HCV Annual Lecture 2023

Recorded October 2023

Each year, the History Council of Victoria presents a public lecture that shares fresh thinking and new evidence on an historical topic. This year, Professor Susie Protschky will present on Colonial Pasts and 'Image Wars'.

Politics has always been visual. In countries with colonial histories, including Australia, a wide range of public actors and stakeholders wield images in their historical arguments. This lecture will examine what happens with visual archives when – as contemporary global politics demonstrates – everybody has opinions about a hotly contested colonial past.



Professor Susie Protschky

Susie Protschky is Professor of Global Political History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She specialises 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.

Susie previously worked at Deakin University (2021–23) and Monash University (2010–21) in Melbourne, and the University of Western Australia in Perth (2008-10). She gained her doctorate at the University of New South Wales (Sydney) in 2007. Her research has been funded by major grants and fellowships from the Australian Research Council, and the Research Centre for Material Culture (Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen), Scaliger Institute (Leiden University Library), and the KITLV (Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies).

Susie is currently writing a history of colonial war photography from the Aceh War to the Indonesian National Revolution (1873–1950). Contracted to Cornell University Press, the book is tentatively titled Seeing Like a Soldier: Photography and Colonial Violence in Dutch Indonesia.