Professor Melissa Miles

Melissa Miles is based in the Art History and Theory program.

Her research explores the interdisciplinary qualities of photography and its movement across the domains of art, law, politics and history. The role of photographs in cross-cultural photographic relations is another key area of research interest. In partnership with Robin Gerster, she has completed a major study supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant on photography in the Australia-Japan relationship from the 1890s to the present. Melissa’s Future Fellowship project examined the important role of photographs in the public sphere, and their special significance in contexts of transitional justice.

Melissa’s research is published in a wide range of journals, including Journal of Visual Culture, Law Culture and the Humanities, Japanese Studies andHistory of Photography amongst many others, and she is a regular contributor to the arts press. Her books include Photography, Truth and Reconciliation (Bloomsbury), Pacific Exposures: Photography and the Australia-Japan Relationship (with Robin Gerster, ANU Press), The Language of Light and Dark: Light and Place in Australian Photography (McGill Queen’s UP and Power Publications), The Culture of Photography in Public Space (co-edited with Daniel Palmer and Anne Marsh, Intellect and the University of Chicago Press), and The Burning Mirror: Photography in an Ambivalent Light (ASP).