Rate My Professor Ky Gentry

Dr. Ky Gentry is a Lecturer in the Discipline of Political Science and International Relations in the School of Social Sciences at The University of Western Australia, a position he has held since July 2016. He earned a PhD from the University of Melbourne and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from Victoria University Wellington. Before joining UWA, Gentry was a Lecturer and Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Australian National University, a Political Research Fellow at Ruskin College, Oxford, and worked for several years at New Zealand's Ministry for Culture and Heritage. He also brings extensive professional experience in heritage consultancy, special collections librarianship, and archiving.

Gentry's research focuses on the intersection of heritage, history, and politics, particularly human rights with an emphasis on cultural rights, historic preservation, and the political use and abuse of cultural heritage and historical narratives. Leveraging a decade of web development expertise, he examines the digital turn's impact on pedagogical practices in universities. As Principal Fellow in UWA's Frontier Technologies and Society Research Lab, his work addresses geopolitical contestations in AI governance and the human rights implications of new technologies. His scholarship has garnered over 480 citations on Google Scholar. Key publications include the book History, Heritage, and Colonialism: Historical Consciousness, Britishness, and Cultural Identity in New Zealand, 1870-1940 (2015); the article "Critical heritage studies and the legacies of the late-twentieth century heritage canon" (International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2019, co-authored with Laurajane Smith); editor of Shipwrecked: New Zealand Maritime Disasters (2019); "'Scenery' and the origins of heritage preservation in New Zealand and Australia" (Journal of Tourism History, 2024); and "'The Invisible Man': H. G. Wells and Human Rights During the Interwar Period" (Human Rights Quarterly, 2019, co-authored with Victoria Mason). Gentry has received major awards such as the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) for 2015-2018 on 'The Presence of the Past: Historic places and community identity in Australia, 1965-2015'; a College of Asia and the Pacific Postdoctoral Fellowship at ANU (2011-2014); New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade funding (2010); Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust and Ruskin College support (2009-2010); and a Ministry for Culture and Heritage Special Research Grant (2007).