Cassandra Pybus

Cassandra Jean Pybus (born 29 September 1947) is an Australian historian and writer. She is a professor of history at the University of Sydney, and has published extensively on Australian and American history.^[1]

Pybus was born in Hobart, Tasmania and educated at North Sydney Girls High School and the University of Sydney.^[2] Her mother, Betty Pybus, was a pioneer of women's health in Sydney and Tasmania.^[3]

From 1989 to 1994, Pybus was editor of the literary magazine Island. She won the Colin Roderick Award in 1993 for Gross Moral Turpitude, a re-examination of the case of Sydney Sparkes Orr, a Northern Irish academic who became embroiled in a scandal involving an relationship with a student whilst working at the University of Tasmania.^[4] In 2000, she won an Adelaide Festival Award for Literature for The Devil and James McAuley, a biography of the poet James McAuley.^[5]

Pybus was awarded the Centenary Medal in 2001 for outstanding contribution to Tasmanian and Australian literature and education.^[6]

Books

• Other Middle Passages (edited with Marcus Rediker and Emma Christopher; 2007)
• Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway slaves of the American Revolution and their global quest for liberty (2006)
• Black Founders: The unknown story of Australia's first black settlers (2006)
• The Woman who Walked to Russia: A writer's search for a lost legend (2004)
• American Citizens, British Slaves: Yankee political prisoners in an Australian penal colony, 1839–1850 (with Hamish Maxwell-Stewart; 2002)
• Raven Road (2001)
• The Devil and James McAuley (1999)
• Till Apples Grow on an Orange Tree (1998)
• White Rajah: A Dynastic Intrigue (1996)
• Gross Moral Turpitude: The Orr Case Reconsidered (1993)
• Community of Thieves (1991)

References