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 so-called 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.

1866: The Worlds of Lowe Kong Meng and Jong Ah Siug— Of Historical Imagination and Moral Relations in

John Young: The History Projects, ed. Olivier Krischer

N Rhook

Power Institute, 2025

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

‘maar bidi: Carving Sovereignty and Desire in Indigenous Youth Storytelling’

E Shiosaki, L Martin, and N Rhook

Cordite Scholarly, February 2021

‘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

T Banivanua 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