About
What the Center does
The Clark Center supports research and teaching about Australia and New Zealand across the Forty Acres. It funds faculty and graduate research through its small grants programs and supports a network of research affiliates drawn from Government, History, Economics, Anthropology, Geography, English, Theatre and Dance, and Engineering. It runs the Undergraduate Research and Mentorship Program, which since 2013 has enabled UT undergraduates and graduate students to contribute to Clark Center research initiatives concerning Australia and New Zealand. Within that program, the West Scholars focus on New Zealand. The Great Barrier Reef May Term, first offered in 2022 and running again in 2027, takes 25 undergraduates to Queensland to study the politics of protecting the reef. The Center brings Australian and New Zealand scholars, diplomats, and public figures to campus and hosts the Australian and New Zealand Studies Association of North America (ANZSANA). The Clark Center does not maintain a curriculum of its own, but it supports courses about Australia across the university. The director has taught Australian Society and Politics (GOV 365J) ten times since 2012, most recently in fall 2025, and has taught the signature course Australia, the United States, and the Rise of China five times since 2022, including this fall. The Politics of Critical Minerals, which carries a substantial Australian and New Zealand component, is in its third year. The Center also pays for teaching in other departments: in fall 2025 it funded a survey of Australian history in the Department of History, and in spring 2026 a course there on Queensland, both taught by Dr. Thanasis Kinias.
The Center does all of this with a very small staff. It is run by its director, Dr. Rhonda L. Evans, with the support of a part-time administrative associate who works seventeen hours a week; that position has been in place for several years and is usually held by a different person each year. Every Center staff position is paid from the Center’s own endowments rather than from College or University appropriations. Undergraduate and graduate research assistants join the Center through its research and mentorship programs, and their numbers rise and fall with the projects underway; the Center’s core operations do not depend on them.
Prime Minister Bob Hawke presents an Aboriginal bark painting to the University at the Center’s inauguration, June 1988.
History
The University of Texas at Austin established the Center in 1988 to mark Australia’s Bicentenary, naming it for Edward A. Clark, the Texan who served as United States Ambassador to Australia during the Johnson administration in the 1960s. Prime Minister Bob Hawke inaugurated it on a visit to campus that June and presented the university with the Aboriginal bark painting that still hangs in the Center. Its founding co-directors were Dr. John Higley and Dr. Desley Deacon.
The Center did not start from nothing. Robert L. Ross, a scholar of Australian literature at UT Austin, had helped found the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies in 1986 and had started its journal, Antipodes. When the Clark Center opened he joined it as a Research Associate, and from about 1991 Antipodes was published in cooperation with the Center. Some twenty issues had appeared that way by 1998, and Ross’s editorship at the Center ran about a dozen years in all. His standing in the association twice brought its national meeting to Austin; when it met here in 2008 the Center hosted the opening reception and John Higley welcomed the participants. Antipodes is still published twice a year, now by Wayne State University Press.
The Center was there at the founding of the other North American body in the field as well. Higley was a founding member of the Australian and New Zealand Studies Association of North America, which began in 1989, and UT Austin has hosted its annual meeting four times: in 1999, 2008, 2014 and 2019. The Center made the 2019 meeting the occasion of its own thirtieth anniversary, and the association established the John Higley Prize there.
In 2001 the Center added New Zealand to its name and mission, and former New Zealand Prime Minister and Ambassador James Bolger marked the change with the gift of a Māori war club. Dr. Rhonda L. Evans has directed the Center since 2012.
Support the Clark Center
The Center is funded by an endowment built by individual and corporate donors, and endowment income covers only part of what the Center’s programs cost. Gifts to the Clark Center fund student research positions, the first-generation scholarship for the Great Barrier Reef May Term, faculty research grants, and public events. To discuss a gift, contact the director, Rhonda L. Evans.
