Simon Ville
Simon Ville, BA Hons, PhD, FASSA, is the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University, 2022-3. He is also Senior Professor of Economic and Business History at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a recent member of the College of Experts at the Australian Research Council. He was born in Britain and holds a BA and PhD from University College London. He has previously worked at the University of Manchester, the University of Auckland, and the Australian National University. He has held visiting fellowships at the University of Glasgow, University College London, the University of Melbourne, the Australian Catholic University, and Harvard Business School, and is an affiliate of the Centre for Economic History at the Australian National University.
He has written extensively on big business, foreign investment, innovation, the rural and resource industries, natural history trading, social capital, transportation history, and the Vietnam War. His work has been published in a wide range of highly ranked journals across disciplines including Journal of Economic History, Economic History Review, Journal of Management Studies, American Economic Review, Economic Record, Australian Historical Studies, History of Science, and Journal of Global History. His books and chapters have appeared with leading university and commercial publishers including Cambridge, Oxford, Melbourne, Manchester, New South, and Auckland university presses, along with Palgrave and Routledge.
Among his major works are The Rural Entrepreneurs: A History of the Stock and Station Agent Industry in Australia and New Zealand (Cambridge University Press, 2000); The Big End of Town. Big Business and Corporate Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia co-authored with Grant Fleming and David Merrett (Cambridge University Press 2004); and The Cambridge Economic History of Australia jointly edited with Glenn Withers (Cambridge University Press, 2015). His International Business in Australia before World War One: Shaping a Multinational Economy will be published by Palgrave in 2022.
He has delivered more than 100 keynote lectures, seminars, and conference papers, presenting his work in over 20 countries across Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, and Australasia. He has a deep commitment to the preservation and use of archives and is currently the patron of the Friends of the Noel Butlin Archives Centre in Canberra.
Currently, he is a chief investigator on two Australian Research Council grants: ‘Reconstructing museum specimen data through the pathways of global commerce’ and ‘A History of foreign multinational enterprises in Australia since Federation’.
He collaborates and consults with a wide range of national and international public and private sector organisations including: UNESCO; Shell Corporation; South Korean Government; Australian Federal Department of Veterans Affairs; New South Wales Government Office for Women; National Council of Wool-selling Brokers in Australia; the Australian Bureau of Statistics; Sky History Channel; Narara Ecovillage; Karratha & Districts Chambers of Commerce and Industry; the Australian Museum, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.