Dr Sianan Healy is Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. From 2020 to 2025 Dr Healy held a Tracey Banivanua Mar Research Fellowship, during which she researched histories of Australian women’s experiences of infertility. Her research examines how structural issues of gender, race and class have impacted on women’s agency, bodily autonomy and access to medical treatment. Medicalised definitions of infertility can hide the political, social and cultural ways in which being unable to bear children have defined women’s identities. Through an interdisciplinary approach to historicising the concept of infertility, this project uncovers the full complexity and ongoing implications of experiences of infertility and treatment in Australia. 

Dr Healy's research also spans fields including Indigenous experiences of assimilation, education and housing, with a focus on themes of mobility, space/place and the built environment. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Centre for the Study of the Inland at La Trobe, during which she researched housing and Aboriginal assimilation policy in regional south-eastern Australia in the post-war period. She will be continuing this research as co-Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project 'Indigenous Mobilities to and through Australia: agency and sovereignties' (DP200103269).