I am a Professor of Media in the School of Communication, Society and Culture.

After being awarded the University Medal for Modern History in 1992, I completed a PhD in Modern History at Macquarie University in 1996. I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney before returning to Macquarie in 2003. I held ARC Queen Elizabeth II Fellowships in the Department of Modern History and Politics, joining the Department of Media, Communication, Creative Arts, Language and Literature MCCALL as a Professor of Media in 2013 and an ARC Future Fellow in 2014, and as Director of Research and Innovation from 2022-24.

I specialise in the history of the media, particularly the Australian media, and am the author of The House of Packer: The Making of a Media Empire (1999), Sir Frank Packer (2000, 2014), Party Games: Australian Politicians and the Media from War to Dismissal (2003), Changing Stations: The Story of Australian Commercial Radio (2009), which was shortlisted for the Ashurst Business Literature Prize and longlisted for the Walkley Book Award, and Australian Radio Listeners and Television Viewers: Historical Perspectives (2020).

My field defining reference work A Companion to the Australian Media (2014) is the first comprehensive, authoritative study of Australia's press, broadcasting and new media sectors, featuring 300 contributors, and is available via AustLit. With Sue Turnbull, I edited the 5th edition of The Media and Communications in Australia, published by Routledge in 2024.

I was the founding Director of the Centre for Media History at Macquarie, and co-ordinated the Media Archives Project. I served as a board member of the State Library of New South Wales (2003-12), historical consultant to the television mini-series Power Games: The Packer–Murdoch Story (2013), a selector for the Australian Media Hall of Fame (2015-19), and a member of the Sounds of Australia expert advisory panel for the National Film and Sound Archive. I am a historical consultant to an exhibition on the Press Gallery to be opened at the Museum of Australian Democracy in 2026.

I am a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and chair the New South Wales section of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. I serve on the editorial boards of the ADB, Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media, Media History, the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and the Australian Journal of Politics and History.