Dr Jessica O'Leary is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Indigenous Studies. She is a gender and cultural historian whose research explores diplomacy, the environment, empire, and knowledge exchange in the early modern world. Drawing on multilingual archival research across Europe, Latin America and Asia, she examines how women shaped imperial and diplomatic relationships and the circulation of knowledge. Her current research focuses on women and children in the Portuguese Empire, particularly in Brazil and Japan, with an interest in how women’s experiences and Indigenous knowledge were recorded, appropriated or excluded from colonial archives.

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She is the author of two books, which have been reviewed in leading international journals, including the American Historical Review. Her journal publications include research in Past & Present, The Historical Journal, Renaissance Quarterly, Gender & History, Women’s History Review and the Journal of Religious History. Her Past & Present article on Indigenous women’s knowledge in colonial archives won both the ANZAMEMS Philippa Maddern Prize and the Australian Women’s History Network Mary Bennett Prize.

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In 2026, she received the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia’s Paul Bourke Award for Early Career Research in Panel C, which encompasses History, Law and Legal Studies, and Philosophy. She has also held fellowships in Australia, Germany and Brazil, including the Harold S. Williams Fellowship at the National Library of Australia, a Max Planck Visiting Fellowship in Frankfurt, a Junior Fellowship at the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality–Inequality in Latin America at the University of São Paulo, and the Renaissance Society of America’s Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellowship.

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Her public-facing writing brings this research to broader audiences, exploring how gender and colonial power have shaped whose knowledge is recognised, whose stories are told, and how we understand the past.