Dr Hugh Anderson FAHA
The University of Melbourne
rrpress@analogdigital.com.au
Qualifications: DLitt (Melbourne)
Year Elected to the Academy: 2011
Discipline: Honorary
Expertise: Australian folklore and popular culture, literary history, bibliography and local history

Hugh Anderson is a historian and Fellow of the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne. His groundbreaking work on Australian folklore and popular culture established the study of folklore as a scholarly field in Australia, and over several decades he has made an outstanding contribution to folklore studies, literary history, bibliography and local history. Much of his work was undertaken while he worked as a schoolteacher, and since 1953 he has written more than a dozen monographs, edited a score of collections of primary sources, compiled eight bibliographies of Australian writers, contributed thirteen entries to the Australian Dictionary of Biography and produced twenty-two textbooks. Hugh Anderson’s standing in the field was demonstrated by his appointment by the Commonwealth government to chair the Commission of Inquiry into Folklife in Australia in 1986, whose report influenced the efforts in other countries to collect and preserve their folk materials. He was a founding member of the editorial board of Australian Folklore, a member of the committee of management of the Australian Society of Authors, and a Councillor and Vice-President of the Royal Victorian Historical Society.