Amanda Nettelbeck's research addresses race and governance in settler colonial histories; the application of colonial law to Indigenous people, including through policing and the courts; the history and memory of Australia's frontier wars; and the ongoing legacies of colonialism in the present. Her most recent book, Unsettled Subjects: Race, Mobility and Colonial Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 'Critical Perspectives on Empire' series, 2025) explores how intersecting concerns around race and non-European mobilitychanged the terms of British subjecthood and informed the possibilities of imagined settler colonial citizenship. Her previous book Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the 19th Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2019) explored the evolutions and imperial antecedents of 'protection' as a legal framework of Indigenous governance in the Australasian settler colonies. It won the 2020 Australian and New Zealand Law & History Society Legal History Prize. 
 
She is co-author with Rob Foster and others of four other monographs relating to history and memory of violence on settler colonial frontiers, and to the application of law to Indigenous peoples.  She is also editor or co-editor of several books, including

A Cultural History of Violence in the Age of Empires (Bloomsbury 2025)
Picturing Citizenship: Images, Belonging and Colonial Legacies (with Fay Anderson, et al, Bloomsbury 2025)
Protection and its Intermediaries in Britain's Antipodean Colonies (with Samuel Furphy, Routledge 2020)
Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony (with Penny Edmonds, Palgrave 2018)
Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World (with Philip Dwyer, Palgrave 2017).

She is current Chair of the Editorial Board of Australian Historical Studies, Australia's oldest history journal; and a past member of the Executive Committees for the Australian Historical Association, the Australian & New Zealand Law and History Society, and the International Association of Australian Studies. She was a member of the ARC College of Experts 2020-2024. She has been part of collaborative research teams working with collecting institutions in South Australia (including State Library of South Australia, the South Australian Museum and History Trust SA) to produce public digital resources on South Australia's colonial histories. She has been the Keith Cameron Chair in Australian History at University College Dublin (2018), and the Australia Japan Foundation Visiting Professor in Australian Studies at the University of Tokyo (2024-2025).She is available to supervise projects on Australian colonial history, comparative settler colonial histories, Indigenous/settler colonial relations, the relationship of Indigenous people to colonial law and policing, the history and memory of frontier violence, and cultures of historical memory and memorialisation.