Rio Creech-Nowagiel

Contact

• work
• Rio.Creech@nottingham.ac.uk

Biography

I am a visual and cultural historian whose focus is primarily on the British Empire, decolonization and counterinsurgency warfare during the Cold War era. My research asks what images reveal and obscure about these intersecting histories and their legacies. I ask similar questions of the archives I work with.

Expertise Summary

I completed my PhD in 2024 at Cardiff University's School of Journalism, Media and Culture in partnership with Imperial War Museums. My research explored the relationship between images and public imaginaries during the Malayan 'Emergency' campaign (which was a twelve-year counterinsurgency war that broke out in 1948 in Malaya, which became Malaysia and Singapore after independence). This research brings together photographic material sourced from the IWM archive and beyond, exploring the visual narratives and techniques that British institutions employed in efforts to justify and promote the costly campaign, while others sought to expose the injustice of the war and the entire colonial project. This work engages with imagery that has endured and been revived in contemporary retellings of the Malayan 'Emergency' by British heritage institutions today. It offers a fresh perspective on an underexplored period of British imperial history, revealing the diverse forms of visual culture that emerged in Britain during a period of crisis marked by 'end of Empire' and onset of the Cold War.

I am currently preparing this research for publication. My current project involves transforming this research into a book, provisionally titled Conflicting Visions: Picturing Britain's 'Emergency' Wars (1948-60).

Research Summary

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher on a 3-year, AHRC-funded project titled 'Resettling the Colonial Lens: Photographs and the (Re)Making of Malaysia's New Villages'. The project examines what… read more

Current Research

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher on a 3-year, AHRC-funded project titled 'Resettling the Colonial Lens: Photographs and the (Re)Making of Malaysia's New Villages'. The project examines what role photography as a medium played in documenting, critiquing and re-writing the history of resettlement in late-colonial Malaya. It involves a number of project partners, including ICOMOS Malaysia, Imperial War Museums and The National Archives.