Stefan is a graduate of the Universities of Tasmania and Cambridge, where he received his PhD in 1988. He has published Policing Morals: The Metropolitan Police and the Home Office 1870-1914 (1994) and a number of articles on the history of policing in Tasmania. His fifth and latest book (written with Carey Denholm) is Dr. Edward Swarbreck Hall: Colonial Medical Scientist and Moral Activist (2016). He is completing a book called Tasmanian Anzacs: Tasmanian Soldiers and World War One and future research will focus on solitary confinement in nineteenth-century Tasmania.