The J.C. Beaglehole Lecture began as the main lecture presented at the New Zealand Historians’ Conferences from 1973 and have continued to be presented as one of the keynote lectures at each NZHA conference since the instigation of the Association. It is named for John Cawte Beaglehole, an eminent New Zealand historian and has been presented over the years by many other eminent New Zealand historians.
2023: James Belich
2021: Margaret Tennant, ‘ Performing the Local: City, Commemoration and Modernity in the Provinces’.
2019: Jim McAloon, ‘Raw material drawn from the remotest zones’: Aotearoa/New Zealand and Capitalism’s Pacific Frontier 1770s-1830s’
2017: Dame Claudia Orange, ‘The Memory of a Nation: An Historian and New Zealand’s National Identity’
2015: Professor Dame Anne Salmond, ‘History, ontology and the nature of the person’
2013: Damon Salesa, ‘Passages in a Native Sea: Some Indigenous Histories of Globalization in the Pacific’
2011: Charlotte Macdonald, ‘The King’s Speech and Sensible Flesh: The pains and pleasures of twentieth-century history making.’
2009: Michael Belgrave
2007: Sir Mason Durie
2005: James Belich
2003: Erik Olssen, Where to From Here? Some reflections on the twentieth-century historiography of nineteenth-century New Zealand
2001: Miles Fairburn
1999: Michael King, ‘A Fraction too much Fiction? Current representations of Maori in New Zealand history’
1997: Judith Binney, ‘Histories in New Zealand’
1996: Jock Phillips, ‘Our History, Our Selves: the historian and national identity’
1994: Donald Denoon, ‘Settler Capitalism Unsettled’
1993: Judith Walkowitz, ‘Going public: shopping, sexual harassment and street walking in Victorian London’
1991: Tipene O’Regan, ‘Old Myths and New Politics: Some Contemporary uses of traditional history’
1989: Nan Taylor, ‘Human Rights in World War II in New Zealand’
1987: W. L. Renwick, ‘Show Us These Islands and Ourselves… Give us a Home in Thought’
1985: David Hamer, ‘The Founding of an Urban Society: Reflections on the Meaning of 1840’
1984: Raewyn Dalziel, ‘Popular Protest in New Plymouth’
1983: Trevor Wilson, ‘Prelude to ANZAC: The attempt at a naval forcing of the Dardanelles, January to March 1915’
1981: (First Beaglehole Lecture at an NZHA conference) Keith Sorrenson, ‘Polynesian Corpuscles and Pacific Anthropology: the home-made anthropology of Sir Apirana Ngata and Sir Peter Buck’
1977: K. R. Howe, ‘The Fate of the ‘Savage’ in Pacific Historiography’
1974: Keith Sinclair, ‘The Lee-Sutch Syndrome: Labour Party Policies and Politics, 1930-1940’
1973: John Pocock, ‘British history: a plea for a new subject.’
The New Zealand Historical Association 