Professor Amanda Nettelbeck

My research in colonial history addresses: race and governance in settler colonial state-building; 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.

I am current Chair of the Editorial Board of Australian Historical Studies, Australia's oldest history journal; an Adjunct member of the Purai Global Indigenous and Diaspora Research Studies Centre and the Research Centre for the Study of Violence, both at University of Newcastle; and am completing a 5 year term on the ARC College of Experts. I am 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.

My last book Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the 19th Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2019) won the 2020 Australian and New Zealand Law & History Society Legal History Prize. My current book project, Unsettled Subjects: Race, Mobility and Colonial Citizenship, is contracted to Cambridge University Press.

I was a member of the research teams that, in collaboration with collecting institutions from the GLAM sector, have produced recent digital public resources on 'The South Australian Frontier and its Legacies' and 'The Overland Telegraph Line: A Transcultural History'.

I am 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.