Professor Amanda Nettelbeck

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 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. Her new book, Unsettled Subjects: Race, Mobility and Colonial Citizenship, is forthcoming in Cambridge University Press's 'Critical Perspectives on Empire' series. She is co-author with Rob Foster and others of 4 other books: Fragile Settlements: Aboriginal Peoples, Law and Resistance in Southwest Australia and Prairie Canada (2016); Out of the Silence: South Australia's Frontier Wars in History and Memory (2012); In the Name of the Law: William Willshire and the Policing of the Australian Frontier (2007, shortlisted for the Chief Minister's NT History Book Award); and Fatal Collisions: The South Australian Frontier and the Violence of Memory (2001, shortlisted in the NSW Premier's Awards).

She is also editor or co-editor of several books, including A Cultural History of Violence in the Age of Empires (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), and 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.