Rosa Campbell is a historian of global feminism. She is a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellowship at King’s College London. She is working on a project about the global history of the four United Nations Conferences on the Status of Women (1975-1995) and the importance of these conferences to Global South feminism. She has held fellowships at Harvard University, The University of Edinburgh and the National Library of Australia.

Between 2019-2023, she was a Jan Smuts Scholar at the University of Cambridge where she completed her doctorate in history. Her doctoral research is the first global history of the Australian women’s liberation movement (1968-1990). Her thesis was highly commended for the Australian Historical Association Serle Prize.

Rosa’s academic research has been published or is forthcoming in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The Journal of Global Intellectual History, The History Workshop Journal, Feminist Review, Australian Historical Studies and Third World Quarterly.

She is passionate about extending ideas and histories beyond the academy, and writes often for a public audience and leads public history projects. Her trade book titled 'The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared,' will be published by Melville House in 2026. This traces the history of Shere Hite and The Hite Report, the feminist sexology bestseller of 1976, which sold 50 million copies and explores why this book and its author all but disappeared from public consciousness.

Research

• Global feminist history
• Feminist political thought

Rosa's work places feminism in a global context and asks how the movement was transformed by global political events, such as wars and migrations, as well as ideas, people and texts from around the world.

Expertise and public engagement

Rosa convenes a reading group for early career scholars working on the global history of feminism. You can get in touch to join.

She also produces work for museums and galleries and is open to future collaborations. Rosa has produced a timeline about the radical 1970s and 1980s for Raven Row Gallery, a digital map about the history of feminist sport for The State Library of New South Wales, and a sensory history for the Royal Albert Hall. She has also worked with the Victoria and Albert Museum on a research project about the feminist histories and futures of the speculum.