Call for Papers Closing Soon
If you want to present at the Centre’s Filim in the Colony Symposium (co-hosted with Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision), then you have until the end of the week to submit your abstract. Details of how to submit are provided below. Make sure you don’t miss out on what promises to be an exciting interdisciplinary event.
https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/crocc/film-in-the-colony-symposium/
Connecting the Colonies: Empires and Networks in the History of the Book
The Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Inc (BSANZ) Annual Conference 2017
Connecting the Colonies: Empires and Networks in the History of the Book
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
22-24 November 2017
Call for Papers
Empires of all kinds – commercial, geo-political, bureaucratic – are defined by their peripheries as well as their centres, by the flows of information that maintain or destabilise their structures of authority and control.
BSANZ, in collaboration with the Society for the History of Authorship Reading and Publishing, invites scholars and researchers to consider the printed word, the book, and texts of all kinds, as both mechanism and matter of transmission.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any matters of bibliographical interest, traditional and contemporary. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Commercial empires: the book as a commodity in colonial contexts
- Across boundaries: print networks across geo-political, commercial or bureaucratic borders
- The trans-temporal: the afterlife of books and re-imagining of ideas
- Indigenous cultures, frontier encounters, and the presence or absence of print
- The stuff of legend: the role of print in constructing colonial and imperial consciousness
- The book as treasured possession: emotion, ownership and display
Proposals for three-person panel discussions are also welcome.
Some financial assistance towards travel costs may be available for postgraduate students who are presenting papers. Please enquire when submitting your proposal, and include a brief budget outlining your anticipated travel costs.
Proposals – including, a 250-word abstract title of paper, name and institutional affiliation of each author, a brief biography of each author, email address of each author, and 3-5 keywords – should be sent to the convenor, Ian Morrison ian.morrison@education.tas.gov.au.
Presenters must be members of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand. The deadline for submissions is Friday 31 March 2017.
CFP: Film in the Colony
On 13 and 14 July 2017, the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture and Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision are hosting the Film in the Colony Symposium in Wellington.
Keynote Speakers: Dame Professor Anne Salmond (University of Auckland), Dr Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk (University of Cape Town)
Organisers invite papers that investigate the cross-cultural processes of film production in the colonial context, and the ways in which indigenous and settler participants – performers, crew, or people from the localities where filming took place – took part in productions. In focusing primarily on New Zealand, South Africa and Australia, the symposium also seeks to develop a comparative analysis of the means through which film contributed to the making of national stories in the late colonial era, and how indigenous communities within these colonies engaged with the first few decades of film culture.
Contributions from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds are welcome, such as film studies, history, Māori and/or indigenous studies, anthropology, archives, screen industries, and communities.
Send a 200-word abstract and a brief bio to filminthecolony@otago.ac.nz by 28 February 2017.
Convenors: Annabel Cooper (Centre for Research on Colonial Culture, University of Otago), Diane Pivac, Honiana Love (Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision), Minette Hillyer, Jo Smith (Media Studies, Victoria University of Wellington).
Screen Wars: Remaking the New Zealand Wars in Celluloid and Pixels
Centre member, Associate Professor Annabel Cooper, is presenting a video conference seminar for the The Identities Network: Constructing and Contesting Dominant Identities in Aotearoa on Tuesday 1 November, beginning at 3pm.
Annabel will be discussing her current project Screen Wars: Remaking the New Zealand Wars in Celluloid and Pixels, a book on screen productions relating to the New Zealand Wars, from 1925 until the present day. The book covers fictional and non-fictional treatments, and film, television and digital media. One distinctive quality that they all share makes screen stories a particularly significant mode of making history about the colonial past: their creation involves both Māori and Pākehā actors, historical advisors, and to greater or lesser extent, crew. For most of these productions the film-makers also elected to film at or near historical locations. So, film productions operate as sites of encounter as well as sites of knowledge production. To what extent are the traces of these encounters, and these whenua, apparent on the screen? Each of these productions created a colonial past for a specific present. This body of successive reiterations provides an index to cultural memory of the colonial past. So, the question of which historical events seemed most compelling to successive generations, how the same figures were rendered at different historical moments, and the shifting emotional registers as the wars came to be thought of in different ways, is also central to this study.
In this session Annabel will take two examples from her book to discuss the way each is shaped by the tangata and the whenua of their production, by their filming on location, and by the traces of their presents as they render their pasts.
Venue: Your University videoconference room or your desktop
Time: Tuesday 1 November, 3 – 4pm
Register: Email Melanie m.milicich@auckland.ac.nz stating the seminar name and venue Chair: Avril Bell
Book & Place Symposium
On 27 and 28 October, the University of Otago Centre for the Book is hosting its annual Research Symposium on the theme of Book and Place.
It will open on the evening of 27 October with a public lecture from Neville Peat in the Dunningham Suite, 4th floor, Dunedin Public Library, starting about 7.00 pm. You are cordially invited to come and listen to this well-known author reflect on his sense of book and place as he describes, in words and pictures, some of New Zealand’s most remote and precious areas and landmarks. An informal reception will follow the talk.
The Symposium proper will begin at the Marjorie Barclay Theatre, Otago Museum at 9.00 am on Friday 28. Professor Tony Ballantyne will begin proceedings, and after morning tea, Dr. Ingrid Horrocks of Massey University will deliver a plenary paper entitled: ‘Writing Place: A Case for Creative Nonfiction’. Nicky Page, Director of Dunedin’s UNESCO City of Literature programme will also be present. Please check out the full programme through the Centre for the Book blog
Importantly, for those attending the Thursday night ecture, please notify the Dunedin Public Library via their Library’s event site that you wish to attend.
To register for the symposium you need to send an email providing your name as you wish it to appear on your name tag and your email address to books@otago.ac.nz
There is no charge to attend the Symposium, which is generously supported by the Department of English and Linguistics, the Division of the Humanities, and the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture.
Hocken Lecture
Tony Ballantyne, the incoming PVC Humanities at the University of Otago, departing HoD of History and Art History, and Director of the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture gave the 2015 Hocken Lecture last week. In it, Tony discussed some archive stories that are foundational to his own work, and critiqued claims about archival silences promoted by some postcolonial scholars by pointing to the lively and rich vein of work being produced at the University of Otago, particularly by researchers attached to the Centre. You can read about his lecture in this Otago Bulletin article, which gives a thorough report on its content and maps out Tony’s vision for New Zealand history. Thanks Tony for a wonderful lecture!
The Lives of Colonial Objects
On the evening of 21st July, Otago University Press launched The Lives of Colonial Objects co-edited by Annabel Cooper, Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla. This sumptuous, beautifully designed book of 50 short essays is the outcome of the Centre’s inaugural conference, Colonial Objects, held at Toitū Otago Settlers Museum in February 2013. Kāi Tahu kaumatua Edward Ellison and Emeritus Professor Erik Olssen co-launched the volume before a large crowd, including a number of the contributors and friends. Now that the book is in the world (and reasonably priced) we encourage you all to buy it!
L to R: Rachel Scott (publisher, Otago University Press), Lachy Paterson, Angela Wanhalla, Annabel Cooper (editors), and Fiona Moffat (designer, Otago University Press).
A World History of Bluff
Michael Stevens, one of the Centre’s members, has had his research on the world history of Bluff featured on the University of Portsmouth’s Port Towns and Urban Cultures Project website recently. This site features research that fits the research group’s goals of “furthering our understanding of the social and cultural contexts ports across the globe from the early modern period. It recognizes the importance of ports as liminal places where marine and urban spaces converge, producing a unique site of socio-cultural exchange that reinforced and challenged identities, perceptions and boundaries.” It’s great to see Mike’s fantastic project on Bluff and its port getting international coverage. Well done Mike!
CFP: Children & Young People in British Colonial Contexts
Dr. Hugh Morrison, with support from the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture, will be hosting a 2-day symposium on 24 & 25 August at the Hocken Collections on the histories and experiences of children and young people. The Call for Papers is below:
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Unpicking the Tapestry: Children & Young People in British Colonial Contexts
Children and young people were ubiquitous and significant players on the stage of national and colonial formation, yet this remains a significant gap in the history and historiography of British world colonial societies like Aotearoa New Zealand. Therefore an exclusive focus on the historical place of children and young people in comparative colonial contexts is timely in terms of further development; both in the New Zealand context and that of the wider British world. Such discussion can inform a better historical understanding that is locally, nationally, and transnationally configured.
This symposium is sponsored by the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture at the University of Otago, New Zealand. It aims to bring together scholars (from New Zealand and beyond) who are interested in a range of aspects of colonial children and young people under the rubric of ‘unpicking the tapestry’. If colonialism is the overall tapestry holding together children’s and young people’s lives, then what is revealed when we begin picking away at the individual strands of this tapestry? In particular the symposium is interested in addressing a number of key questions which include: What does it mean to talk about ‘colonial childhoods or adolescence’ or to think about children and young people in relation to colonialism? What colonial sites were significant or influential for children’s and young people’s lives, and in what colonial sites were children influential? To what extent were children and young people constrained by boundaries or moved fluidly across boundaries (eg. gender, race or ethnicity, nation, class, religion), and to what effect? What are the sources for excavating and interpreting colonial childhoods? What are the gaps and silences? How do we negotiate these? In what ways might a comparative approach (across colonial societies) expand or limit our understanding of colonial childhoods and adolescence? What are the significant challenges and opportunities in this field of academic enquiry? These are some of the questions we wish to explore further over two days of keynote address, paper presentations and round-table discussions.
The keynote speaker will be Canadian historian Professor Kristine Alexander, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Child and Youth Studies at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta. She will be joined in round-table discussions by education historian Professor Helen May (College of Education, University of Otago) and one further person to be confirmed. Up to a further 16 paper presentations are anticipated in plenary session form (half hour sessions per paper).
Paper proposals should be sent by email to Dr Hugh Morrison (hugh.morrison@otago.ac.nz) in the form of a 300 word (maximum) abstract, accompanied by a paragraph giving academic or professional background by Tuesday 31 March, 2015. Accepted papers will be notified by Friday 24 April at the latest. There will be no registration/symposium costs for presenters, but travel and accommodation costs will need to be individually paid for. It is anticipated that symposium papers will be published as an edited book collection or special journal issue.
Elemental Histories Programme
Colonial Worlds, Elemental Histories Symposium Programme,
Hocken Collections Seminar Room, Friday 31 October
To register email Tom Brooking (tom.brooking@otago.ac.nz)
9-10: Associate Professor Grace Karskens, University of New South Wales, ‘Colonial worlds, elemental histories.’
Session 1: 10-11.15
Professor Tom Brooking, University of Otago, “Yeotopia Gained: New Zealand 1840-1914’.
Associate Professor Katie Pickles, University of Canterbury, ‘Elementally United: The Case of Canterbury’s Nor’west Wind’.
Dr Michael Davis, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Sydney, ‘Entangled Knowledges: Indigenous and Environmental Histories across the Tasman’.
11.15-11.30: morning tea
Session 2: 11.30-12.20
Emeritus Professor Holland, University of Otago, ‘Getting to Know You: People and Rabbits in Southern New Zealand’.
Dr. Vaughan Wood, University of Canterbury, ‘Mapping the network of a nineteenth century Canterbury farm’.
12.20-1.20: Lunch
Session 3: 1.20-2.35
Professor Michael Roche, Massey University, ‘The Forest as an Elemental Natural Resource in Colonial New Zealand and the First Failure of Scientific State Forestry 1874 to 1877.’
Dr André Brett, University of Melbourne, ‘Forests and Provincial Abolition: Did Conservation Kill the Provinces?’.
Dr James Beattie, University of Waikato, ‘Expanding the Horizons of Chinese Environmental History: Cantonese gold-miners in colonial New Zealand, 1860s-1920s.’
2.35-3.00 afternoon tea
Session 4: 3.00-4.15
Lucy Mackintosh, PhD candidate, University of Auckland, ‘Shifting Grounds: Narratives of Identity in Auckland Landscapes’.
Dr. Joanna Cobley, University of Canterbury, ‘The Nineteenth Century Landscape: economics, heritage and national identity.’
Professor Eric Pawson, University of Canterbury, ‘Writing environmental history’.
4.15-5.00: Grace Karskens wrap up and general discussion
5.15: Book launch of James Beattie, Matthew Henry and Emily O’Gorman (eds)., Climate, Science, and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New Zealand, Palgrave MacMillan, London, 2014.
