Rate My Professor Nikolas Orr

Nikolas Orr is an art historian and global history scholar affiliated with the University of Newcastle's Centre for the Study of Violence, where he completed his PhD in 2024. His thesis, titled 'Contemporary Indigenous Iconoclasm in Global Perspective: Contested Monuments in Three Settler Colonies, c. 1968–2000,' supervised by Philip Dwyer and Nancy Cushing, examines the significance of monument activism in anticolonial struggles of First Peoples. Orr earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture with first-class honours from the University of Sydney in 2005 and a Master’s in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture with distinction from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2013. Following his undergraduate studies, he spent 11 years working as an educational materials editor in Spain.

Orr has held teaching and research positions in the University of Newcastle's School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences and Newcastle Law School. He is co-investigator on the 'Reimagining Monuments Using Digital Arts' project. His academic interests focus on monuments within European imperial projects of the British and Spanish empires, iconoclasm involving the destruction, modification, and resignification of symbols, and the role of iconoclasm in anti-colonial resistance from the 1970s to the present, particularly highlighting Indigenous actors and transnational activism. He also studies early modern challenges to colonial visual regimes. Key publications comprise 'Smashing Statues: Re-evaluating Iconoclasm in History' in the English Historical Review (2023), 'Protest Art on Contested Statues Igniting Conversations about Art, Law, and Justice' co-authored with Marie Hadley in Nuart Journal (2023), 'Ideological Vandalism of Public Statues: Copyright, The Moral Right of Integrity and Racial Justice' with Sarah Hook in Griffith Journal of Law & Human Dignity (2022), 'Transdisciplinarity in Extended Reality (XR) Research Design: Technological Transformation and Social Good' in Virtual Creativity (2021), and forthcoming chapters such as 'Monumental Copper and Coal: The Case for Including Extractivism in the Rethinking of Colonial Commemorations' in The Palgrave Handbook on Rethinking Colonial Commemorations (2023) and 'Dreaming of Destruction: From Direct Action to Speculative Iconoclasm in Aboriginal Protest, Australia, 1970–2021' in Visual Redress in Africa from Indigenous and New Materialist Perspectives (2023). His work contributes to fields of visual culture, heritage, and transnational history.