Tamson is Director of the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney. Previously she was ARC DECRA Fellow at the University of Sydney, Lecturer in Imperial History at Brunel University London, and Sir Christopher Cox Junior Fellow at New College Oxford.
Tamson’s research focuses on the history of ideas and the global politics of knowledge in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is particularly interested in the relationship between the content and the contexts of knowledge production and consequently much of her work has focused on universities and their networks and structures. These were themes she explored in Empire of Scholars: universities, networks and the British academic world, 1850-1939 (Manchester, 2013) and when co-editor of The Transnational Politics of Higher Education (Routledge, 2016). Tamson is one of the editors of History of Education Review and is leader of the ARC funded project Expert Nation: universities, war and 1920s-30s Australia. Her current book project explores questions of internationalism, American empire and education in the interwar period, through the lens of the untold story of the 1926 “Floating University” world-cruise.