Kay Daniels: Her Teaching and its Legacy

Kay Daniels was born in Adelaide on 17 June 1941, the daughter of working-class parents. She attended state schools, then the University of Adelaide, where she studied with Ken Inglis, Ian Turner, and Hugh Stretton. In 1963, she won the George Murray travelling scholarship and used it, not to go to Oxford as her teachers had expected, but to go to the radical Sussex University. There with Asa Briggs and David Daiches as supervisors, she wrote her PhD, entitled ‘New Grub Street’, a study of 1890s English literature and society. Raymond Williams, the cultural studies scholar, was its examiner. Kay taught history at the University of Tasmania between 1967 and 1988.