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 intersections of materiality and practice, and of visual culture and structures of power.

Brett is author of Surveillance Aesthetics: Stasi Photography & its Afterlife (forthcoming Bloomsbury, 2027); Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 (Routledge, 2016); co-editor with Natalya Lusty of Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (Routledge, 2019), which was awarded AAANZ AWAPA Best Anthology 2020; and co-editor with Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Modernist Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury, 2024). Her research has been supported by an Academy of the Humanities, Ernst & Rosemarie Keller Award in 2017 for her work on the East German Stasi Surveillance Archive, a Sloan Fellowship 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 and an Oliver Smithies Lecturership of Balliol at the University of Oxford.

Brett’s current research projects are On Disaster: Photography, Media, and Visual Culture and Modernist Photobooks and Propaganda.

Brett is a Series Editor of Photography, History: History Photography, Routledge with Elizabeth Edwards, Jennifer Tucker and Patricia Hayes, 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.