Susie Protschky,
Historian
I am an historian of colonialism and visual culture in Southeast Asia, focusing particularly on photography. My research ranges across histories of violence, environment and natural disaster, and gender and race in colonial context. I work with museums and custodial institutions as well as in the academy.
About Me
I am Professor of Global Political History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
My current projects examines how amateur photographs have generated histories and legacies of decolonisation in Southeast Asia, and how visual sources shed new light on histories of living with disaster in colonial Indonesia. My earlier research was on colonial art and tropical environments, modernity and citizenship, and monarchy and empire.
My research has been supported by the Australian Research Council, and international fellowships at the Research Centre for Material Culture, Scaliger Institute (Leiden University Library), and the KITLV Leiden (Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies).
I am a member of the Editorial Board for Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI)/ Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia. I am a founding member and on the steering committee of the History, Memory and Decolonial Futures Research Collective, Board Member of the Research School for Political History for the Netherlands and Belgium, and member of the Advisory Board for the project, ‘Het Huis Oranje-Nassau en de koloniale geschiedenis’.
I previously worked at Deakin University (Melbourne, Australia, 2021–23), Monash University (Melbourne, Australia, 2010–21) and the University of Western Australia (2008-10). I gained my doctorate at the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia) in 2007.
Prize-winning book, Photographic Subjects: Monarchy and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia Manchester University Press, ‘Studies in Imperialism’ Series, 2019.
Winner of the Asian Studies Association of Australia Mid-Career Book Prize and the Royal Studies Journal Book Prize.
Photographic Subjects examines photography at royal celebrations during the reign of Queens Wilhelmina (1898-1948) and Juliana (1948-80), a period spanning the zenith and fall of Dutch rule in Indonesia. It is the first monograph in English on the Dutch monarchy and the Netherlands' modern empire in the age of mass and amateur photography. Photographs forged imperial networks, negotiated relations of recognition and subjecthood between Indonesians and Dutch authorities, and informed cultural modes of citizenship at a time of accelerated colonial expansion and major social change in the East Indies/Indonesia.
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