AustLit

'Inga Clendinnen was a historian whose primary research interest was the exploration of the social conditions of extreme violence in different periods and societies. She was born Inga Vivienne Jewell, the youngest of four children in a working-class family in Geelong in 1934. She read English and history at the University of Melbourne, coming under the influence of Max Crawford, and earned a first-class degree in 1955. In that same year, at the age of twenty, she married John Clendinnen, a philosopher of science at the University of Melbourne. They had two sons. She was tutor in the history department at the University of Melbourne from 1955 to 1968. In 1969 she took up a post in the newly-founded La Trobe University, where she worked in the congenial company of colleagues open to global history informed by the social sciences.'  (Introduction)

‘Inga Clendinnen, who died in Melbourne on 8 September 2016, was an historian whose primary research interest was the exploration of the social conditions of extreme violence in different periods and societies. She was born Inga Vivienne Jewell, the youngest of four children, in Geelong in 1934. Her father had a cabinet and furniture workshop, the income of which he shared with his workers during hard times. The family lived on a precarious footing, with frugality built into Inga’s early life.’ (Introduction)