Writing Popular History
We are looking forward to hearing visiting scholar Dr. Nick Brodie’s presentation, “From PhD to Popular Author”.
After completing a doctoral dissertation in late medieval and early modern English vagrancy legislation, Nick Brodie has become a popular author of Australian history. His books, Kin: A Real People’s History of Our Nation (2015); 1787: The Lost Chapters of Australia’s Beginnings (2016); and The Vandemonian War: The Secret History of Britain’s Tasmanian Invasion (2017) mark him as one of Australia’s most prolific and critically acclaimed writers of popular history. In this talk Nick will discuss his journey from PhD to popular author. He will address the challenges of balancing scholarly integrity with popular accessibility, the opportunities for historians outside of the university sector, and will talk about some of the historical discoveries he has made along the way.
Please join us for Nick’s talk on Wednesday 15 November in Burns 5, starting at 3.30.
The Emotions of Family History
This week the Centre is hosting several visiting scholars: Kristyn Harman and Nick Brodie from the University of Tasmania, as well as Tanya Evans from Macquarie University, a noted historian of women, motherhood and the family in Britain and Australia. While in Dunedin, Tanya will give a public lecture on ‘The Emotions of Family History’.
In this lecture Tanya will explore the emotions of family history in Australia, England and Canada – why family historians are motivated to undertake their research and the emotional impact of their discoveries. Using survey data and oral history interviews it will reveal some of the ways in which historical research and communication about the past provides ‘ordinary’ people with social, emotional and cultural capital – how it has transformed them, their lives and the lives of those around them. Family history researchers are sometimes dismissed by the academy for their amateurism and they are also criticised for seeking emotional connections with the past lives of their forebears. I want to suggest that these criticisms are linked. The derision still sometimes shown towards genealogists needs to be challenged and the practice of family history better understood because it has an enormous impact on historical consciousness and individual subjectivities.
All are welcome to attend the talk, which is scheduled for Tuesday 14 November, 5.30pm in Moot Court, 10th floor of the Richardson Building at the University of Otago.
Cleansing the Colony: Lecture and Book Launch
Dr. Kristyn Harman (University of Tasmania), who was a visiting scholar with the Centre in 2014, has returned to Dunedin for the launch of her latest book, Cleansing the Colony: Transporting Convicts from New Zealand to Van Diemen’s Land. She will also give a public talk on her book at Toitū.
Please feel free to come along to one or both of these events. Details are below:
Lecture: ‘Cleansing the Colony’, Tuesday 14 November, 10am at Toitū Otago Settlers Museum Auditorium.
During the mid-nineteenth century at least 110 people were transported from New Zealand to serve time as convict labourers in the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). Even more were sentenced by colonial judges to the harsh punishment of transportation, but somehow managed to avoid being sent across the Tasman Sea. In this talk, the remarkable experiences of unremarkable people like William Phelps Pickering, a self-made entrepreneur turned criminal; Margaret Reardon, a potential accomplice to murder and convicted perjurer; and Te Kumete, transported as a rebel will be explored. Their stories, and others like them, reveal a complex colonial society overseen by a governing class intent on cleansing the colony of what was considered to be a burgeoning criminal underclass.
Book Launch: Thursday 16 November, 5.30pm at University Book Shop, 378 Great King Street.
Katie Pickles awarded a James Cook Research Fellowship
The Centre for Research on Colonial Culture extends warmest congratulations to Prof. Katie Pickles of the University of Canterbury’s History Programme, and former President of the New Zealand Historical Association, on being awarded a prestigious James Cook Research Fellowship by the Royal Society Te Apārangi. Katie will use the James Cook Fellowship to research heroines in global history, a topic on which she has extensively published during her career. We extend our congratulations on this wonderful acknowledgement of her research excellence and celebrate the recognition this award brings to New Zealand’s colonial and post-colonial histories. All the best for the project, Katie.
CRoCC Seminar: Skeletons in the Attic
A reminder that our final seminar of the year will be presented by Dr. Rosi Crane, a newly minted Associate Member of the Centre. She will speak about the prehistory of Otago Museum’s zoological collections, which were acquired before the First World War but have precious little documentation associated with them. Drawing upon the specimens themselves, labels and photographs, this presentation will consider how we can use these sources to make sense of the scientific approaches to curating in nineteenth century Dunedin.
Please join us at 3.30 on Friday 27 October in the Hocken Seminar Room (90 Anzac Avenue) to hear what promises to be a great talk.
Seminar: Skeletons in the Attic: The Prehistory of Otago Museum
Our next CRoCC seminar will be presented by Dr. Rosi Crane, who will speak about the prehistory of Otago Museum’s zoological collections.
These collections were acquired before the First World War but have precious little documentation associated with them. Serendipitous finds in scattered archives are beginning to paint a detailed picture of what the public saw when the museum opened in its new building on Great King Street in 1877. However, the principal sources are the specimens themselves, their labels, and a handful of photographs. This presentation will consider how we can use these sources to make sense of the scientific approaches to curating in nineteenth century Dunedin.
Please join us at 3.30 on Friday 27 October in the Hocken Seminar Room (90 Anzac Avenue) to hear what promises to be a great talk.
Mapping Workshop
Centre member Jane McCabe has had a busy year. In May her first book was published, and officially launched the following month. It’s been well-received and getting some great media attention including a spread in the Dominion Post, as well as on the New Books Network. Jane also started a new project in February.
Rural history is at the heart of her Marsden Fast Start project entitled ‘Splitting up the Farm? A Cross-Cultural History of Land and Inheritance in Aotearoa’. In late June she hosted a mapping workshop based around that project, which was supported by the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture. The one-day workshop brought together experts in rural history, land titles and mapping to discuss best practice in use of maps and land titles in order to help Jane as she works towards the production of effective visual outputs for the project. Jane began the day with a presentation in which she set out the research questions and aims for her investigation of familial land transfer in two districts (Taieri and Hokianga) from 1870 to 1970. This helped set the framework for the workshop and focus discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of land titles for a project about cross-histones of land use and inheritance. In order to foreground the land, and attitudes to it, Jane proposed a survey of land titles/ownership to show change over time, with the aim of collating data for communication on a digital platform.
Participants discussed the value of maps in helping think about the past spatially. One inspiring suggestion was that project participants might be encouraged to draw maps of their farms so that familial and individual approaches to land use could be illuminated, thereby providing a multiplicity of voices to land use that does not rely on official maps and land titles. Personal mapping might also enable social and cultural data to be mapped that might look different to official data, detailing how families members who might not be named as owners in fact worked and used the land. Later sessions discussed land titles and their value as historical sources for mapping land ownership over time and cross-culturally.
The Centre thanks Jane for hosting this event and all the participants for sharing their expertise: Malcolm McKinnon, Michael Roche, Jonathan West, Brian Coutts, Vivienne Cuff, Michael Stevens, Hugh Campbell, Tom Brooking, Michael Stevens and Angela Wanhalla, as well as Karen Craw for kindly showcasing the Hocken’s map holdings relating to the Taieri.
The Centre has been busy hosting a number of workshops this year, and have many more on the horizon. There’s a whaling history symposium in late June 2018 in Honolulu, for instance, along with plans for an event on Māori writing in November 2018, as well as a possible workshop on rural history in late 2018. Watch this space for further details.
Stripping Colonial Studies Back to Their Bones
The Centre’s research seminar series resumes on Friday 29 September with a presentation by Dr. Charlotte King (Department of Anatomy).
Her talk is titled: “Stripping Colonial Studies Back to Their Bones: Combining bioarchaeology and history to look at European settlement of Tokomairiro”.
Charlotte will discuss the recent excavation of ‘forgotten’ areas of the St John’s Anglican cemetery in Milton, which has given bioarchaeologists an unprecedented opportunity to reconstruct the biological histories of some of the first European settlers in the Otago region. This talk will detail what archaeologists can do to shed light on the lives of these settlers, and how this might intersect with the social histories generated by historians.
Please join us on Friday 29 September at the Hocken Library Seminar room, 90 Anzac Avenue for this talk, which begins at 3.30. Afternoon tea is provided.
All are welcome.
Summer Scholarship Opportunities
Four Summer Scholarships are available to students interested in working with Professor Charlotte Macdonald and Dr. Rebecca Lenihan on their Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Project, Soldiers of Empire.
These scholarships are for the 2017-18 summer and involve working with collections at several institutions. There is one scholarship at Puke Ariki in New Plymouth, one available at Auckland Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira, and one at Te Papa, Wellington.
Applications are welcome from students who have completed at least two years of their undergraduate degree and are enrolling in 3rd year, the Honours programme, or the first year of a Masters degree in 2018.
Please note that the closing date for applications is 15 September.
Further details about the scholarships and how to apply can be found here.
New Histories of Pacific Whaling Symposium
Call for Papers
New Histories of Pacific Whaling
An International Symposium co-sponsored by the Rachel Carson Center, the University of Oregon and the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture, University of Otago, New Zealand
University of Hawai’i – Mānoa, June 29 – 30, 2018
Emerging historical scholarship is upending older work on whaling and showcasing it as an ideal medium with which to investigate human relationships with the oceans and with each other. Whales offer investigative bridgeheads into the cultural histories of non-human species, the hidden histories of energy economies, and the complicated histories of cross-cultural contact. Whale histories are demonstrating to environmental historians the various scales, including oceanic scales, with which they can work and are challenging them to consider new forms of evidence and new tools of interpretation. This international symposium aims to bring together the excellent, scholarship integrating the history of Pacific whaling with environmental and cross-cultural history. We seek participants from around the world to convene next year at Honolulu, the center of the Pacific whaling industry. We especially welcome scholarship that engages Pacific and environmental history and examines the crucial linkages between whaling, animal histories, indigenous histories, capitalism, diplomacy, environmental change, and globalization.
Participants will be expected to pre-circulate drafts of works in progress in advance of the symposium. Selected papers will be published as a special issue of Rachel Carson Center’s Perspectives. Travel and lodging costs will be covered by the seminar sponsors.
For those interested, please email 250-word paper proposals along with a short cv to the symposium conveners by September 1, 2017
Ryan Tucker Jones, University of Oregon rtj@uoregon.edu
Angela Wanhalla, University of Otago angela.wanhalla@otago.ac.nz
