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.
