Ringing in the New Year
It’s that time of year – time for the annual blog post on Centre activities, forthcoming publications, and other exciting news from our members.
Helen May’s year started with the award of a new years honour for services to education, becoming an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
Hugh Morrison has a new book appearing with Otago University Press in February called Pushing Boundaries: New Zealand Protestants and overseas missions, 1827–1939 and it will be launched in early April. He has also accepted an invitation to join the Grace Abbott Book Prize Committee (international Society for the History of Children and Youth), to decide on the “best book in the field published in English over the previous year”.
In February the Centre is hosting the Making Women Visible Conference, which honours Barbara Brookes, and features the launch of her new book, A History of New Zealand Women, on the conference programme.
In December Tony Ballantyne was awarded the W. H. Oliver Prize by the New Zealand Historical Association for his book Entanglements of Empire, published by Auckland University Press. In November Tony gave a keynote at the Race, Mobility and Imperial Networks Conference in Melbourne. He has contributed a chapter to How Empire Shaped Us (Bloomsbury) and his co-edited book with Antoinette Burton, World Histories from Below (Bloomsbury), will appear in September.
Tom Brooking is on Research and Study Leave, and will spend some time at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich, and as a visiting scholar at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University.
Angela Wanhalla and Lachy Paterson were promoted to Associate Professor.
Angela Wanhalla is co-organising the Making Women Visible Conference, and in October 2015 replaced Tony Ballantyne as co-editor, with Barbara Brookes, of the New Zealand Journal of History.
Annabel Cooper was one of four scholars awarded the inaugural University of Otago Prestigious Writing Grant to complete her book Screen Wars: Remaking the New Zealand Wars in Celluloid and Pixels, which charts changes to screen narratives about colonial conflict from the silent film era to the age of the phone app.
In 2015 Megan Pōtiki contributed an essay to a special issue of the New Zealand of History dedicated to Māori history, as did Michael Stevens.
The April 2016 volume of the New Zealand Journal of History is a special issue dedicated to ‘New Zealand Sexual Histories’. It is co-edited by Chris Brickell and Angela Wanhalla, and is an outcome of the workshop, supported by the Centre, they co-convened in July 2015.
Judy Bennett contributed a chapter to New Zealand’s Empire (Manchester University Press), co-edited by Katie Pickles and Cathy Coleborne. In 2015 the Chief of Army (Australia) invited Judy to address the Chief of Army History Conference in Canberra, on the theme Geo-Strategy and War: enduring lessons for the Australian Army, held at the Ballroom, National Convention Centre, 30 September-1 October. She spoke on “South Pacific: Using Indigenous resources in the Second World War”. Following the open conference, Judy also contributed to a ‘closed’ one-day teaching-learning session on scenarios for possible military and civil disturbances that may involve the Australian armed forces in the region, including the Pacific. Her visit was fully funded by the Chief of the Army.
Congratulations to all!
Centre News: Research and Publications
Here’s a brief round up of what some of the Centre members have been up to over the past few months.
Hugh Morrison has been investigating New Zealand and Scottish Presbyterian missionary children’s experiences, including interviewing 21 people in New Zealand and Scotland over the last year. He gave a research seminar at the Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies at the University of Edinburgh in January, called ‘Sand Through the Fingers: Tracing Notions of Scottish Cultural Identity in the Narratives of New Zealand Presbyterian Missionary Families, 1890-1940’. He’s got a few publications in the works, including one emerging from a workshop in Germany (July 2014) on Indigenous teachers in mission school contexts in Bolivia, and had a book review published in Social Sciences and Missions (2015). He reviewed Timothy Yates (2013), The Conversion of the Māori: Years of Religious and Social Change, 1814-1842. In late August Hugh is convening a symposium on children and young people in colonial contexts, which is sponsored by the Centre.
Tom Brooking has been busy over the past six months. He’s had an article on Seddon and the Pacific published in the Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies (2014) and book reviews published in Agricultural History (2014) and New Zealand Books. He has managed a third launch (after Dunedin and Hokitika) of King of God’s Own in Parliament sponsored by the Attorney General Chris Finlayson with the former Chief Historian and editor of Te Ara, Jock Phillips, giving the book his blessing. A fourth launch will take place at Powell’s Bookshop in Portland, Oregon during the New Zealand and Australian Studies section of the Western Social Science Association Annual Conference after Easter. His paper at this conference is on his next project on ‘The Making of Rural New Zealand’, entitled ‘Larkrise to Littledene’. The paper he gave on Seddon and Joseph Chamberlain at last year’s Birmingham symposium on Chamberlain is being published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of an edited collection. Tom’s final RSL at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, has been confirmed where he will work with Professor Eugenio Biagini on colonial nationalisms, and make progress on his book on the making of rural New Zealand. He will also visit Gallipoli, and Tyne Cot to assist with his teaching of the course on New Zealand and the First World War. Finally, Tom will give a paper at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environmental History in Munich.
As well as running a successful conference on eugenics in the British colonial world in February this year, John Stenhouse has also published ‘Missionaries and Science and Medicine’ in The Oxford Encyclopaedia of the History of American Science, Medicine and Technology (2014).
Other Centre members, as noted in an earlier post, have published books, including Tony Ballantyne’s Entanglements of Empire (Duke and Auckland), which provides a new interpretation of the Anglican mission in northern New Zealand, while Barbara Brookes co-edited a book, Bodily Subjects. Another co-edited book is soon to be published: The Lives of Colonial Objects, co-edited by Annabel Cooper, Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla, will appear with Otago University Press in July. This book is a product of the Centre’s inaugural conference, Colonial Objects, which took place way back in January 2013. Eight of the 50 essays have been written by Centre members.
During late February and early March, Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla spent three weeks in Canada on visiting fellowships. They were based for two weeks at the University of Alberta (History and Native Studies) and one week at the University of Manitoba (History), where they gave a series of research talks and public lectures on various topics, including Indigenous literacy and Māori women’s writing; histories of intermarriage and empire; and the social impacts of American servicemen in the South Pacific during WWII, including a screening of the documentary film, Born of Conflict. In April, Lachy will be attending a pre-read workshop at the University of Cambridge (UK) on Print Media in the Colonial World, sponsored by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities.
New Publications
Congratulations to Tony Ballantyne and Barbara Brookes on the release of their newest books. Tony’s book, Entanglements of Empire, was released by Duke University Press in late December, with a New Zealand imprint published by Auckland University Press being released in April.
In the past week, a collection of essays co-edited by Barbara Brookes with Canadian colleagues Tracy Penny Light and Wendy Mitchinson (both University of Waterloo), Bodily Subjects: Essays on Gender and Health, 1800-2000, was released by McGill-Queen’s University Press. The collection explores the historical entanglement between gender and health across two centuries and in a variety of locations through essays ranging from the nineteenth-century British Poor Laws, an Aboriginal reserve in 20th century Queensland, AIDS activists on the streets of Toronto in the 1990s.
Congratulations Barbara and Tony!
