Amy Hodgson

Amy Hodgson is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Melbourne. Her Ph.D. project examines the experiences of victims of the Pinochet dictatorship participating in Chile’s two truth commissions to ask how truth commission processes can be improved to better meet the emotional and psychological needs of survivors of mass conflict. Amy was inspired to research Chile’s two truth commissions while growing up in Australia’s Chilean diaspora in the 1990s and experiencing the conspiracy of silence that accompanied Chile’s decades-long political repression and social conflicts. She now travels to Chile for three months every year to interview survivors of political imprisonment, relatives of the executed and disappeared, and the former commissioners of the two truth commissions. She also works as a teaching assistant in undergraduate subjects on human rights, democratization and post-conflict processes, and U.S. foreign policy’s impact on Latin America at the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University. Before commencing her Ph.D. at Melbourne University, Amy completed her Bachelor of Arts with Honours in History at La Trobe University.