Some of the following research was made possible by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (ARC DP170100948) titled ‘Disaster, human suffering and colonial photography’ funded between 2017 and 2019.

Book

Images of the Tropics: Environment and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia (Leiden: Brill/ KITLV Press, 2011).

More about my monograph here.

Chapter overview: Introduction: Environment and visual culture in the Netherlands Indies –– 1. Historicizing colonialism: The legacy of images made during the East India Company period in Dutch ways of seeing. –– 2. Narratives of expansion: Colonial landscape images and empire building. –– 3. Naturalizing conquest: Rural idylls in colonial painting. 4. –– Articles of faith: Religion, fear and fantasy in Indies landscapes. 5. –– Seductions of the tropics: Race, class and gender in colonial images of nature and landscape. –– Conclusions and Epilogue: Landscape, visual culture and colonial history.

Edited Volumes

‘Disaster in Indonesia: Along the fault line toward new approaches’, Special issue on ‘Disaster in Indonesia’, edited by Susie Protschky, Indonesia 113 (April 2022): 1-8.

Journal Articles (Peer Reviewed)

‘Indonesian tourism workers on volcanoes and geotourism’s colonial origins: Making a subaltern history visible’, Itinerario, 48:3 (2024): 268-93. OPEN ACCESS

‘Military responses to and forms of knowledge about natural disaster in colonial Indonesia, 1865–1930’, Indonesia 113 (April 2022): 65-88.

(with Ruth Morgan), ‘Historicising sulfur mining, lime extraction and geotourism in Indonesia and Australia’, TheExtractive Industries and Society, 16 February 2021. OPEN ACCESS.

‘Dutch still lifes and colonial visual culture in the Netherlands Indies 1800–1949’, Art History, 34:3 (2011): 510-35, OPEN ACCESS.

‘Seductive landscapes: Gender and European representations of nature in the Dutch East Indies in the late colonial period’, Gender & History, 20:2 (2008): 372-98. OPEN ACCESS.

‘Nature and identity in colonial Indonesia: Literary constructions of being Dutch in the tropics’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 164:1 (2008): 13-37, OPEN ACCESS.

Book Chapters

‘Landscape painting in Indonesia: Continuity and change in President Sukarno’s collection’ in Low Sze Wee and Patrick D. Flores (eds), Charting Thoughts: Essays on Art in Southeast Asia (Singapore: National Gallery of Singapore, 2017).

‘Environment and visual culture in the tropics: The Netherlands Indies, c. 1830–1949’ in Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie (eds), The Routledge History of Western Empires (London: Routledge, 2014), 382-95.

Blogs

These blogs were commissioned by the Research Centre for Material Culture (Netherlands) while I held the Tholenaar van Raalte Fellowship in Photography in 2018.

‘Searching for Indonesian Histories of Disaster in Photography’, hosted by the Research Centre for Material Culture, June 2020.

‘Not for the public – human remains: Decolonising disaster in the museum’, hosted by the Research Centre for Material Culture, June 2020.

‘Who is the intrepid explorer here? Indonesians living with disaster’, hosted by the Research Centre for Material Culture, June 2020.

Media

‘Garden of the East – A look at how we look at Indonesia’, The Conversation, 21 February 2014.