Skye Krichauff

Skye Krichauff

School of Humanities

Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Economics

Eligible to supervise Masters and PhD - email supervisor to discuss availability.

Skye Krichauff is an ethno-historian who combines the methodologies of history and anthropology. She is interested in colonial cross-cultural relations, the relationship between history and memory, how societies live with historical injustices (in particular how Australians live with the enduring legacies of colonialism) and environmental history.

From 2020-2023 Skye was employed as Project Manager, oral historian and one of two archival researchers on ARC linkage project 'Reconciling with the Frontier' and the 'South Australian Frontier and its Legacies' website went live during Reconciliation Week in May 2024. She co-edits Studies in Oral History (the journal of the Australian Oral History Association) and is a member of Australian Dictionary of Biography South Australian Working Party, and sits on the editorial committee of the Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia. She has been employed by South Australian Native Title Services as an expert-historian on several successful Native Title claims.

Skye has worked as a history researcher for Aboriginal Community organisations, an oral historian for the Indigenous Oral Health Unit at the University of Adelaide, and as an expert ethnohistorian for South Australian Native Title Services.

Her areas of specialisation include Australian colonial history, colonial cross-cultural relations, encounter history, environmental history, belonging and senses of place, legacies of historical injustice, grassroots reconciliation, Native Title research including apical ancestor identification.

Skye was awarded the University of Adelaide's School of Humanities Early Career Researcher Prize for 2020. Her article 'Recognising Country: tracing stories of wounded spaces in mid-northern South Australia' won the Australian Historical Association's inaugural Ann Curthoy's prize and was published in History Australia in 2020. Her first book Nharangga Wargunni Bugi-Buggillu: A journey through Narungga History (Wakefield Press, 2011) examines cross-cultural relations on nineteenth century Yorke Peninsula, South Australia. Her second book Memory, Place and Aboriginal‒Settler History (Anthem Press, 2017) is a place centred ethnography which investigates the absence of Aboriginal people in settler descendants’ historical consciousness.

Skye has taught courses on Australian history, colonial history and Aboriginal-settler history at the tertiary level. She currently convenes a comparative course titled 'Aboriginal people and the colonial world' which focusses on Australia, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. 

Skye is employed as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Historical and Classical Studies at the University of Adelaide. In 2024 and 2025 Skye is convening the courses HIST1108: Empires in World History and HIST3052: Aboriginal People in the Colonial World.

  • Current Higher Degree by Research Supervision (University of Adelaide)
    Date Role Research Topic Program Degree Type Student Load Student Name
    2025 Principal Supervisor T. Harvey Johnston, zoologist, the prickly pear and biological control Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Part Time Ms Bridget Jolly
    2024 Co-Supervisor The role of private charities in Adelaide during the Depression Decade 1927-37 Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Mr Liam Michael Horwood
    2024 Principal Supervisor Critical historical biography of my great-great-great uncle Sir Thomas Elder, early South Australian pastoralist, parliamentarian and philanthropist, with the focus on his philanthropy. I am investigating the origins and nature of Elder's philanthropy, and what this reveals about him. Master of Philosophy Master Full Time Ms Diana Elizabeth Prichard

  • Past Higher Degree by Research Supervision (University of Adelaide)
    Date Role Research Topic Program Degree Type Student Load Student Name
    2020 - 2024 Co-Supervisor ‘This subject will not go away’: Memorialising frontier conflict in South Australia Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Mr David Charles Milazzo
    2020 - 2023 Co-Supervisor ‘Your connections to Nappamerrie is as strong as ours’: Pastoralism, Paternalism and the Legacies of Settlement Master of Philosophy Master Full Time Miss Madeleine Paige Sallis
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