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Front page of the Australia ICOMOS Historic Environment journal

Publication: Historic Environment Vol 35 number 1 2023 (2024)

‘Manifesto for Queer Heritage Practice 1.0’: Call for action

“Queer takes different forms across time periods and global cultures; and these diverse forms do not map directly or necessarily onto recent Western LGBTQIA+ identities.“

This manifesto was co-authored with Steve Brown, Celmara Pocock, Lucas Lixinski, Alison Oram, Denis Byrne, Eleanor Casella, João Pedro Otoni, Sharon Sullivan, Robert Mason, Yorick Smaal, Amilcar Vargas, and Matt Devine. It can be downloaded from the Australia ICOMOS web site.

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Poster for "Decolonizing Museums and Resignifying Monuments" conference

International Congress: Decolonizing Museums and Resignifying Monuments (Madrid; Nov 20-22, 2024)

Excavating Potentiality: Appraising German National History Museums’ Engagements with German Colonialism

“[S]ilences within museum discourses can hinder meaningful analysis through […] frameworks, especially when silence on colonialism dominates the overall narrative.”

Presented at the international congress “Decolonizing Museums and Resignifying Monuments” as part of their “Museums: Case Studies, Decolonization in Progress” panel.

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Poster for "Creating a Disturbance" conference

International Conference: Creating a Disturbance: Interventions into Historical Monuments and Statues (Johannesburg; Nov. 14-16, 2024)

The Elephant in the Cityscape: Contemporary Contestation of the World’s Largest Bismarck Monument

“[S]o long as Bismarck’s colonial entanglements are not officially addressed in this German port city indelibly linked with colonial pursuits and policy, the ongoing public conversation on his image will instead take the form of unauthorised vandalism, rather than being silenced outright.”

Presented at the international conference “Creating a Disturbance: Interventions into Historical Monuments and Statues” in Johannesburg, in a co-authored paper with Prarthana Narendra Hosadurga.

Poster for the "Veiled Cities" conference

International Conference: Veiled Cities – Haunted Urban Realities in Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Art, Architecture and Material Culture (Oxford; Sep 26-27, 2024)

Filling in the Blanks: Excavating Colonial Berlin

“A focus on entanglements and collaboration between these institutions both during and after the official colonial empire, as well as their evolutions, would be particularly useful as a means of understanding not just how colonialism worked in the past, but how coloniality has continued to manifest in the city of Berlin and the minds of its inhabitants to the present day.”

Presented at the international conference “Veiled Cities – Haunted Urban Realities in Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Art, Architecture and Material Culture” as part of their “Colonial Spirits, Entangled Sites” panel.

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Seminar Series: Objects in Distress (Online; Jun 6-20, 2024)

I-cula ni Bokola – Feeding into the Cannibal Myth

“[W]hen an object is labelled simply as “cannibal fork”, what else is a visitor going to believe about its intended purpose?”

Presented at the Design History Society virtual seminar series “Objects in Distress” as part of their “Misunderstood Objects” panel. A recording of this presentation will be made available for public access on the DHS website.

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Spring School: Uncomfortable Heritage in the Baltic Sea Region and Beyond: From Negation to Re-interpretation (Kulice; Mar. 10-15, 2024)

Is Colonialism History? Investigating German National History Museums’ Engagements with German Colonialism

“[T]asked with reflecting the authorised identity of a historically troubled nation, the narrations of German national history museums may well serve to function as a litmus test for whether Germany is as serious and holistic about its Vergangenheitsbewältigung (‘coming to terms with the past’) as it claims.”

Presented at the Council of the Baltic Sea States Spring School 2024 “Uncomfortable Heritage in the Baltic Sea Region and Beyond: From Negation to Re-interpretation” as part of the panel “Dark sites: Holocaust and Colonialism–A Still Uncomfortable Heritage?”

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International Conference: Taboo in Cultural Heritage (Amsterdam; Feb 1-2, 2024)

I-cula ni Bokola – Feeding into the Cannibal Myth

“[T]he i-cula’s central position in the representation of Fiji in the West is fascinating indeed – not for what it tells us about Fijians, but for what it tells us about those who have collected and displayed the i-cula, and about those who unquestioningly continue to do so.”

Presented in Amsterdam at the conference “Taboo in Cultural Heritage -Reverberations of Colonialism and National Socialism” as part of the panel “Collecting and Narrating the Heritage of Colonialism”.

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Publication: FWD: Museums (2023)

Queerbaiting the Museum? A Critical Look at Australia’s “Largest Ever Show of Queer Art”

“[I]ronically, one of the “queering” decisions made by the curators for this exhibition—namely a selective reluctance to explicitly editorialise—may have actually served to work against its aims.”

This paper was published as part of the 2023 “Redacted” issue of FWD: Museums. It can be purchased from Bridge Publishing.

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