History, Memory and Decolonial Futures Research Collective

Collective members

Areas of expertise

A/Prof Shameem Black

Shameem uses critical and creative approaches to analyse globalisation, culture, and gender in twenty-first-century fiction and popular culture in English, with particular attention to India, South Asian diasporas, and the cultural work of English in Asia.

Prof Marieke Bloembergen

Marieke is Professor of Heritage and Postcolonial Studies in Indonesian History at the Institute for History and the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies.

Dr Sadiah Boonstra

Sadiah is a Historian and Curator with a broad cultural practice. Her research and professional interests focus on the entanglement and legacies of cultural history, heritage and the performing arts of colonial and contemporary Indonesia.

Dr Matthew Champion

Matthew’s research focuses on how time was made, perceived, and experienced from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries.

Prof Deirdre Coleman

Deirdre is a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor. Her research examines the links between natural history, slavery, and empire, as well as 18th and 19th century literature and cultural history; abolitionism, women's writing, travel, colonialism (West Africa, West Indies, Botany Bay), the development of racial ideology, and the gothic.

Dr Wulan Dirgantoro

Wulan’s research interests are gender and feminism, and trauma and memory in Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art, with a special focus on Indonesia and Timor-Leste.

Dr Julia Doornbos

Julia’s research examines everyday places and experiences of in- and exclusion; senses of belonging; memory work; postcolonialism; diaspora and forced migration. She is also interested in ethics, reflexivity, positionality and participatory/decolonising approaches within qualitative research.

Dr Erin Fitz-Henry

Erin works primarily on transnational social movements, with a particular interest in movements for the 'rights' of nature in Ecuador, the United States, and Australia.

Prof Chris Healy

Chris’s primary interest is Remembering Aboriginality. He has been researching and publishing on the relationships between historical and cultural studies for more than two decades.

Dr Rachel Hughes

Rachel is a human geographer with wide-ranging interests in the geographies of law, geopolitics, public memory and visual and material cultures. Her research has largely focused on issues of memory, justice and geopolitics in reference to late-twentieth century Cambodia.

Dr Julia Hurst

Julia is a postdoctoral scholar and her research explores fundamental questions of Australian Aboriginal identity in 21st century Australia.

Dr Odette Kelada

Odette has a PhD in literature researching the lives of Australian women writers, and her writing focuses on marginalised voices, gender, and racial literacy.

A/Prof Rosanne Kennedy

Rosanne’s research interests cover trauma, memory and witnessing in Australia and transnational contexts; Holocaust studies; Stolen Generations; life-writing studies; feminist theory; cultural theory; literary theory; 19th and 20th century novel; women writers; law and literature; gender and modernity.

Dr Lia Kent

Lia's research is interested in the myriad ways in which individuals and communities make sense of legacies of state violence and protracted conflict. She is especially interested in how vernacular practices of social repair intersect with states' regulatory and governance practices and global peacebuilding discourses.

Prof Zoe Laidlaw

Zoe’s primary expertise lies in the nineteenth-century history of the British Empire, and her work encompasses imperial networks and governance; humanitarianism; settler colonialism and Indigenous-settler relations; slavery, its abolition and legacies (including especially in Australia); the imperial state; commissions of inquiry; the creation of imperial knowledge; and collective biography.

Dr. Grace Leksana

Grace has a strong background of interdisciplinary research, particularly in history and anthropology.

Dr. Lynda Ng

Lynda’s research encompasses Australian literature (with particular emphasis on Aboriginal literature), Chinese literature (especially diasporic literature) and postcolonial literatures (including migrant fiction). She is also interested in the intersection of economics and literature, with a focus on neoliberalism.

Prof. Susie Protschky

Susie’s expertise is in modern Dutch colonialism, Indonesian history, and the history of photography. Her research ranges across visual cultures of war and violence, environment and natural disaster, gender, race and citizenship.

Dr CQ Quinan

CQ’s expertise lies in the fields of trans studies and queer theory, with a particular focus on examining how anxieties around nationality and racial difference come to be transposed onto queer, trans and gender diverse bodies and subjectivities.

Dr Ken Setiawan

Ken’s research interests include globalisation and human rights, as well as historical violence and transitional justice.

Prof Sonja van Winchelen

Sonia’s research takes place on the cross-disciplinary node of law, life, and science in a globalising world. She is currently working on the postcolonial politics of bioscience governance in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on Indonesia.

Prof Sara Wills

Sara’s research focuses on migration, multicultural and refugee histories, with particular reference to memory and museum studies.