Professor Annette Hamilton

Annette Hamilton (PhD Sydney University) is Professor in Film Studies and Media Anthropology in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts.  Originally trained as a cultural anthropologist she worked in several remote indigenous Australian communities between 1968 and 1985 and appeared in a number of landmark Northern Territory Land Rights cases as anthropologist and expert witness.  She has published numerous articles based on many aspects of her research in indigenous Australian societies including her book, Nature and Nurture: Child-Rearing in North Central Arnhem Land (1981). 

From 1985 she changed her research field to focus on the anthropology of media in Asia especially Southeast Asia. Her work on cinema in Thailand is well known and some of her work has appeared in translation (Japanese, French and Spanish).  She  co-edited (with Chris Berry and Laleen Jayamanne) The Filmmaker and the Prostitute: Dennis O'Rourke's “The Good Woman of Bangkok” (1997). Other  recent publications include work on cinema in the "post-socialist" states (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia).  

Her major current project is concerned with politics cinema and history in Cambodia and she is preparing a book on Film and the Khmer Rouge.  She has supervised many PhD students over the years, most recently Dr Ae-Gyung Shim Yecies on South Korean Cinema (2010).  She was Dean of the Faculty of Arts at UNSW 2002-6 and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences.