Born Perth, WA.
BA (Hons), Joint First Class Honours (History/English), 1991
PhD (History), UWA, 1995 - 'The professional development of rehabilitation in Australia, 1880-1981'
Graduate Diploma in Psychology, Monash, 2019

Key research areas: Mental health history, history of medicine, women's history and health, history of Indigenous mental health

Recent books, monographs and book chapters:

P Martyr (2012) Beyond 'Beyond Reason': images of people with mental disabilities in Australian film since the 1970s. In: Lawrence Rubin (ed) Mental Illness in Popular Media: Essays on the Representation of Disorders, North Carolina: McFarland, 2011: 238-255

P Martyr (2002) Paradise of Quacks: an alternative history of medicine in Australia, Macleay Press, Sydney.

P Martyr (2002) 'Unworthy of strong women'. In: J Biggs, R Davis (eds) The Subversion of Australian Universities, Fund for Intellectual Dissent, Wollongong, pp 118-126.

Recent refereed journal articles:

Martyr, P. (2018), The Shawcross Affair: sex, politics, and madness in Western Australia, 1937-39. Health and History. 20, 1, p. 52-71 20 p.

Martyr, P. & Janca, A., (2018), ‘A matter for conjecture’: leucotomy in Western Australia, 1947–70. History of Psychiatry. 29, 2, p. 199-215

Martyr, P. & Davison, S., (2017), Aboriginal people in Western Australian mental hospitals, 1903-1966. Social History of Medicine. 23 p., hkx006.

Martyr, P., (2017), A brief history of forensic mental health services in Western Australia. Australasian Psychiatry. 25, 3, p. 297-299 3 p.

Editor or peer reviewer since 2008:

Australasian Psychiatry
Health and History
International Journal of Mental Health Nursing
Journal of Australian Studies
Journal of Teaching and Learning for Graduate Employability
Law and History
Media/Culture
PROVenance
ReCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia