For the last 15 years I’ve been researching and writing about settler colonialism, language, law, medicine and political life among Chinese, South Asian and European communities in Victoria. My work calls for a re-imagining of the multiple languages and medical knowledges, variously marginalised and empowered across the streets, courtrooms, shops, medical rooms, boarding houses and Parliament House of 1890s-1910s Melbourne/Naarm. I’ve translated my archival research to public audiences via walking tours, blogs, creative writing, and the Melbourne City Library-turned online exhibition, Moving Tongues: Language and Migration in 1890s Melbourne.

Beyond “Waste” and In/fertility: Courage and Poetry in the Heart of Rot in

Women of a Certain Courage, ed. Bron Bateman

N Rhook

Fremantle Press, 2025

Architecture, Poetry and Impressions of Bendigo Chinese Herbalist, James Lamsey’,

N Rhook

Cordite Poetry Review, 2017.

Listen to nodes of empire: speech and whiteness in Victorian hawker's license courts

N Rhook

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 15(2), 2014

“Turban-clad” British Subjects: Tracking the Circuits of Mobility, Visibility, and Sexuality in Settler Nation-Making

N Rhook

Transfers 5(3), 104-122, 2015

Counter Networks of Empires: Reading unexpected people in unexpected places

TB Mar, N Rhook

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 19(2), 2018

“The Chief Chinese Interpreter” Charles Hodges: mapping the aurality of race and governance in colonial Melbourne

N Rhook

Postcolonial Studies 18(1), 1-18, 2015

‘Annamese Coolies’ at Australian Ports: Charting Colonial Geographies of Emotion, and Settler Memory, from French Vietnam to New Caledonia via Interwar Australia

N Rhook

Australian Historical Studies 48 (3), 399-415, 2017

‘The Chinese Doctor James Lamsey’: performing medical sovereignty and property in settler colonial Bendigo

N Rhook

Postcolonial Studies 23(1), 58-78, 2020

Affective Counter Networks: Healing, Trade, and Indian Strategies of In/dependence in Early'White Melbourne'

N Rhook

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 19(2), 2018

Speaking in grids: race, law, and audibility in late colonial Victoria

N Rhook

La Trobe University Doctoral Thesis, 2014

Speech, Sex, and Mobility: Norwegian Women in a Late Nineteenth-Century" English-speaking" Settler Colony

N Rhook

Journal of Women's History 28(2), 58-81, 2016

The Balms of White Grief: Indian doctors, vulnerability and pride in Victoria, 1890–1912

N Rhook

Itinerario 42 (1), 33-49, 2018

What’s in a Grid?: Finding the Form of Settler Colonialism in Melbourne

Global Urban History