ART HISTORIAN

Associate Professor Donna West Brett is an art historian and Chair of Art History at the University of Sydney. Her internationally recognised transhistorical and interdisciplinary research on photography interrogates the intersection of materiality and practice, visual culture and structures of power.

Brett is author of Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 (Routledge, 2016); editor with Natalya Lusty of Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (Routledge 2019), which was awarded AAANZ AWAPA Best Anthology 2020; and editor with Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Modernist Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury, 2024). Brett is a recipient of the Academy of the Humanities, Ernst & Rosemarie Keller Award in 2017 for her work on the East German Stasi Surveillance Archive, and Sloan Fellow in Photography at Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Trinity College, 2024), where she studied the Chadwyck-Healey Collection of Photobooks as part of the project Modernist Photobooks, Propaganda and the Everyday. In Hilary Term, 2026 she will be an Oliver Smithies Lecturer of Balliol at the University of Oxford.

Brett’s current book projects are, Surveillance Aesthetics: Stasi Photography & its Afterlife (Bloomsbury), and On Disaster: Photography, Media, and Visual Culture.

Brett is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Visual Cultures and German Contexts book series with Bloomsbury Academic and Chair of the Photographic Cultures Research Group. MORE

BANNER IMAGE: H. Scott Orr, (1881-1972) The destruction of airship SL-11 near London Sep 1916. Gelatin silver prints | 13.4 x 8.3 cm (image) | RCIN 2503180. Royal Collection Trust, London.