Academy Fellow

Across more than three decades, Andrea Witcomb has made internationally significant contributions to museum and heritage studies by reshaping understanding of the social and interpretive role of museums. Her work has challenged approaches that view museums primarily as instruments of state power, hegemonic interests, or governmental agendas. Instead, she has developed an influential body of scholarship demonstrating how museums can function as sites of critical engagement with difficult and contested histories. This perspective has helped shift international debates towards a more nuanced understanding of museums as spaces of dialogue, reflection, and ethical encounter.

A defining feature of Witcomb’s scholarship has been her sustained examination of the relationship between museum interpretation, affect, and historical understanding. Her work has shown how exhibitions create emotional and sensory modes of engagement with histories of trauma, dispossession, conflict, and social injustice. By demonstrating how affective encounters can deepen historical understanding, she has contributed to the development of a significant field of inquiry that now informs both museum scholarship and exhibition practice internationally.

Witcomb was also among the earliest scholars to critically assess the implications of digital technologies for museums. At a time when digital innovation was often discussed in largely technical terms, she developed a distinctive research agenda focused on how digital interventions transform the interpretation and experience of difficult histories. Her work helped establish a critical framework for understanding digital media as active agents in shaping historical understanding and visitor engagement, influencing subsequent research in digital heritage and museum studies.

A second major strand of her research has addressed cultural diversity, migration, and representation. Through her analyses of migration museums and exhibitions, she has become a leading voice in international discussions about how museums represent cultural difference and belonging. Her scholarship has advanced debates concerning multiculturalism, identity, citizenship, and social inclusion, while providing conceptual frameworks for museums seeking to represent diverse histories and communities.

Witcomb has also made a foundational contribution to exhibition studies through her identification of a lexicon of curatorial strategies for managing voice within exhibitions. By analysing how authority, testimony, expertise, and participation are negotiated through exhibition design, she has shown how curatorial practice can create more dialogic forms of engagement, particularly around difficult and contested histories. This work has provided scholars and practitioners with an influential vocabulary for analysing exhibitionary practice.

More recently, Witcomb has opened new directions in decolonial museum studies through her work on histories of collecting and the interpretation of colonial collections. Challenging the disciplinary frameworks through which collections have traditionally been organised and understood, she has developed innovative approaches that reposition collecting histories themselves as critical interpretive resources. Together, these contributions have shaped international scholarship and museum practice across the fields of difficult histories, affect, digital interpretation, migration, exhibition studies, and decolonisation, establishing Witcomb as a leading scholar whose work has expanded both the conceptual and practical possibilities of museum practice.

Deakin Distinguished Professor in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, Deakin University, 2023 -

Associate Dean Research, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University 2020-2026

Professor in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, Deakin University, 2014-2023

Associate Professor in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, 2006-2013

Senior Lecturer in Cultural Heritage, Curtin University, 1999-2006

Lecturer in Cultural Heritage, Curtin University, 1996-1998

Faculty of Arts and Education, Research Mentoring Award, 2018, Deakin University

1.      Paterson, A; Witcomb, A; Sculthorpe, G; Shellam, T. Zylstra, B. (2025). Collecting the West: Revealing Western Australia through its Collection, UWA Press, Crowley.

2.      Witcomb, A. (2024). “Engaging with colonial collections today: Practising ‘epistemic disobedience’”, in Alexandra Bounia and Andrea Witcomb (eds) The Ethics of Collecting Trauma: The role of museums in collecting and displaying contemporary crises. London, Routledge.

3.      Witcomb, A. (2020). “Sticky” Objects, Faces and Voices in the Museum: Love and Sorrow’s Use of Affective Interpretation Strategies to Challenge Masculinist Commemorations of World War I”. In Joy Damousi, Deborah Tout-Smith, Bart Ziino (eds.) Museums, History and the Intimate Experience of the Great War: Love and Sorrow, Abingdon, Routledge.

4.      Paterson, A and Witcomb, A. (2021) “ ‘Nature’s Marvels’: The value of collections extracted from Western Australia”, Journal of Australian Studies, 45(2): 197-220.

Gibson, J.M., Sculthorpe, G., Paterson, A., and Witcomb, A. (2024). “Connecting Collections: Transforming Access to Museum Collections at Scale for Knowledge Generation in Australia.” Museum Worlds 12 (1): 126-41. https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2024.120111