The New Zealand Historical Association

Steve Behrendt finishes as Head of Programme in June 2013, to be succeeded by Kate Hunter. Giacomo Lichtner continues as Postgraduate Coordinator. Charlotte Macdonald and Cybèle Locke are honours coordinators, and Adrian Muckle organizes the Programme’s Friday lunchtime seminar series. If you interested in giving a seminar please contact Adrian.

Our two major publications from 2012 are Adrian Muckle’s, Specters of Violence in a Colonial Context, New Caledonia, 1917 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) and Cybèle Locke’s Workers in the Margins: Union Radicals in Post-War New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012). Giacomo Lichtner’s Fascism in Italian Cinema since 1945: The Politics and Aesthetics of Memory, will be published by Palgrave-Macmillan in May 2013.

Victoria’s History Programme welcomed new colleagues Cybèle Locke (June 2012) and Valerie Wallace (November 2012). Cybèle teaches courses on Māori and Pākehā in the nineteenth century world and comparative labour history. Valerie teaches courses on British radicals and comparative colonial governments. Cybèle comes to Victoria after seven years at Connecticut College, where she taught transnational courses on labour, women’s and indigenous movements. Valerie comes to Victoria after completing her postgraduate work at the University of Glasgow and postdoctoral fellowships at the University College London and Harvard University.

In September 2012 Associate Professor Anna Green joined the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies. Anna taught previously at the University of Exeter, and in 2013 she is teaching an honours course in the History Programme. Anna also is on the editorial board of the Journal of New Zealand Studies. The submission deadline for the 2013 issue of the Journal is 1 July 2013. Papers are welcome from any discipline and on any topic, and all submissions go through a process of anonymous peer review.

In April 2013 Arini Loader took up a position as the first History Programme post-doctoral fellow, following the submission of her PhD thesis, ‘Tau Mai E Kapiti te whare wananga o ia, o te nui, o te wehi, o te Toa: Reclaiming Early Raukawa-Toa Writing from Otaki’. Arini has been based at Te Kawa a Māui/School of Māori Studies at Victoria for the better part of the last ten years. She is pleased to have ‘crossed Kelburn Parade’ to join the whānau at the History Programme and welcomes the (slight) change of scene.

In June colleague Catherine Abou-Nemeh joins us as our early modern historian, replacing Glyn Parry. Catherine completed her PhD at Princeton University in 2012, and currently lectures there. Catherine studies the histories of science and medicine. Glyn, who joined Victoria in 1989, resigned last year to take up a Professorship at Northumbria University in Newcastle, England.

On 27-28 August 2012 Victoria University hosted the seventh New Historians’ Postgraduate Conference in Wellington, with keynote addresses by Susann Liebich, a recent History PhD recipient from Victoria, and Associate Professor Jennifer Frost (Auckland). There was a range of interesting papers by students from New Zealand and Australia. In May 2013 Susann will begin a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. Susann will bring historical expertise to a cultural studies project concerning magazine culture and travel writing in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, 1920-1950.

In August 2012, the Antipodean East European Study Group organized a conference on ‘1918: National Councils and Great Powers’, the keynote speaker was Martin D. Brown of Richmond, the American University in London. Dr. Brown was also the second Novara visiting lecturer. The following month the Group, together with Victoria’s German Programme, organized a conference on ‘Tonics, Elixirs and Poisons: Psychoactive Substances in European History’.

In October 2012 Victoria established a new India Institute as a consortium of scholars actively engaged in research on India in New Zealand. History’s Sekhar Bandyopadhyay will be its first Director. Sekhar gave the inaugural India Centre seminar on 22 March 2013, discussing his Marsden project ‘Dalits in the History of Partition in Eastern India.’

In December 2012 Adrian Muckle (History) and Teresia Teaiwa (Pacific Studies, Victoria), hosted the biennial Pacific History Association Conference, which attracted 240 participants and significant contributions from around New Zealand as well as Fiji, Guam, Hawai’i and Samoa. One highlight: Victoria honours student Nicholas Hoare won the inaugural Neil Gunson Essay Prize in Pacific History (for postgraduate students), awarded at the conference, for his essay, ‘“Harry” Holland and Samoa: the Labour leader’s “Samoa complex”’.

Alexander Campbell, who completed his History honours degree in 2012, won a full scholarship to do a Master’s Degree in History at Central European University in Budapest.

Nick Hoare is one of a new group of Victoria postgraduate students, and he will work on a Master’s project concerning Anti-Colonial Voices in New Zealand, 1883–1945. Geoffrey Brown began his PhD study this year, and is working on ‘Rusyns and Subcarpathian Ruthenia, 1918-1938. Other new PhD students are Louise Marie Mataia who is researching Samoan women’s work during the Second World War, and Nazima Parveen, who is researching partition and space in Muslim ghettos in Delhi.

Four students successfully defended their PhD dissertations in the past year: Andrew Scott Cooper, ‘Fateful Consequences: US-Iran Relations During the Nixon and Ford Administrations, 1969-77’; Susann Liebich, ‘Connected Readers: Reading Practices and Communities Across the British Empire, c.1890-1930’; Steven Loveridge, Sentimental Equipment: New Zealand and the Great War and Cultural Mobilisation’; and Jo Bunce, ‘James Macandrew Of Otago: Slippery Jim or a Leader Staunch And True?’.

Dr. Cooper, author of The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East (2011), will soon start research and writing a history of the Iranian Revolution for Henry Holt and Company, a prestigious publisher based in New York City.

The most recent publication among our currently enrolled postgraduate students is Matthew Cunningham’s ‘Australian Fascism? A revisionist analysis of the ideology of the New Guard’, Politics, Religion & Ideology, 13, 3 (Sept. 2012), pp. 375-393.