Stephen Murray Robertson attended King’s High School from 1981 to 1985.

At the 1985 prizegiving Stephen was awarded the honour of being Dux of the School, he won the Mayhew Memorial Prize for History, the D.I.C. Prize for English in Form 7, the Old Boys' Prize for All-Round Merit, and a Service Award for service to the school.

He was a School Prefect, the School Council Secretary, a member of the Editorial Committee for the School Magazine and winner of the secondary school section of the Tom Lloyd Photography Contest. He played for the 1st XI Hockey team and acted in the School Musical “Salad Days”.

On leaving King's Stephen received his BA (Hons) degrees in English and History from the University of Otago and a PhD in History from Rutgers University in the USA. He held postdoctoral fellowships at the American Bar Foundation and in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. From 2000 – 2013 he was a member of the Department of History at the University of Sydney, Australia. For six years, from 2013 – 2019, he served as director of the Roy Rosenzweig Centre for History and New Media.

Stephen is now a professor, in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at the George Mason University. The University is an institute for Digital Innovation Research in Fairfax County, Virginia. The University was originally founded in 1949 as a northern branch of the University of Virginia.

At Mason University Stephen is a cultural and social historian of the twentieth-century United States. Since 2003, digital history has occupied a central place in his research, in the form of Digital Harlem, a site that integrates material from a diverse range of sources to produce maps that offer visualizations of the complexity of everyday life in the 1920s. The site formed part of a collaborative project involving three colleagues in the Department of History, and the Arts e-Research unit, at the University of Sydney.

Digital Harlem won the American Historical Association’s inaugural Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History and the American Library Association’s ABC-CLIO Digital History Prize in 2010. Stephen has published articles and book chapters about digital history methods and tools, digital legal history, digital publication, and the teaching of digital history. He has also authored books: Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880 –1960; and of Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars.

Stephen has published articles and book chapters on sex crimes, modern childhood, everyday life in 1920s Harlem, and undercover investigation in journals such as Gender and History, the Journal of Social History, the Journal of Urban History, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality.