Professor Bailey will speak on research methodologies and problem solving in social sciences, what are the different types of sources and how to use these sources and archives. 

Associate Professor Matthew Bailey is currently the Discipline Chair of History & Archaeology, Macquarie University. Matt is one of Australia’s leading retail historians. His book, Managing the Marketplace: Reinventing Shopping Centres in Post-War Australia (Routledge, 2020) was the first book on the subject, and one of the few to comprehensively examine Australian retail history. Matt has published widely on retail and retail property history, including in leading international and Australian journals such as Journal of Urban History, Urban History, Enterprise & Society, Asia-Pacific Economic History Review, Journal of Australian Studies,
History Australia, and the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing. Matt’s research explores the intersections between business, urban and cultural history. This extends from the ways that retailers responded to the dramatic demographic and geographic changes of suburbanisation, to the internal cultures of firms, to the practices of shopping within consumer capitalism. He employs mixed methods approaches combining archival research, data analysis and oral history interviews. Matt frequently provides media commentary on histories of retailing, department stores, shopping centres, and shopping. He is an experienced
interviewer and has undertaken consumer research consultancy for firms in the Australian retail property sector. For the past 12 months, Matt has been consulting with the Powerhouse Museum Parramatta for a major exhibition on shopping malls in Australia. He is also currently working on an Australian Research Council funded project on the history of Australian department stores.