Rowan Cahill is an Australian historian and journalist, with a background as a teacher and farmhand, who variously worked for the trade union movement as a rank and file activist, delegate and publicist.
Formative journalistic influences during the 1960s were gained on the University of Sydney student newspaper Honi Soit under the editorships of Hall Greenland and Keith Windschuttle.
In 1967 Cahill was a founder of Sydney Free University (1967–1972); between 1969 and 1973, he was a member of the editorial board of Australian Left Review (ALR), a bi-monthly journal of theory and practice published by the Communist Party of Australia.
During this period, ALR had a pioneering role in introducing the work of Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) to Australian intellectual and political audiences.
In 2013 Cahill was awarded a PhD by the University of Wollongong for his dissertation on the life and times of controversial Australian left-wing journalist and intellectual Rupert Lockwood (1908–1997), a key figure in the Petrov Affair and the ensuing Royal Commission on Espionage (1954–1955).