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HISTORY AND ART HISTORY NEWSLET TER - 2013

N E W S L E T T E R 2 0 1 3

FROM THE H.O.D.

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY & ART HISTORY

2013 has been a busy and successful year for the Depart-ment of History and Art History. In addition to discharging the key routines of departmental life – teaching under-graduates, supervising our postgraduate research students, conducting our research, and making a full contribution to the life of the University and the various communities we engage with – staff prepared for an external review con-ducted by the University’s Quality Advancement Unit as part of the usual 7 year cycle of reviews.

This was an excellent opportunity for the Department to reflect on all aspects of its operations, administration and

planning. The review gave the Department a very strong endorsement: its final report offered 39 commendations for specific initiatives and areas of particular strength. The panel was impressed by the Department’s research cul-ture, its commitment to quality undergraduate teaching, the strength of its postgraduate programme, and its effi-cient administration. It particularly underlined the Depart-ment’s special strengths in New Zealand, and more par-ticularly Māori, history and its distinctive track record of winning major external research grants.

Those strengths were confirmed within weeks of the re-

Historians entering the wharenui Tamatea at Ōtākou during the NZHA conference in November.

HISTORY AND ART HISTORY NEWSLE T TER - 2013

lease of that report. In late September it was announced that Dr Angela Wanhalla had won one of the Royal Society of New Zealand’s prestigious Rutherford Discovery Fel-lowships. In October we learnt that Dr Michael Stevens had been awarded a highly competitive Fast Start Mars-den grant by the Royal Society for his project ‘Between Local and Global: A World History of Bluff’. While the Department’s research capacity in New Zealand and Māori history is unusual, there are excellent researchers across the Department as a whole. That was confirmed by As-sociate Professor Takashi Shogimen’s winning of a pres-tigious Suntory book prize, an accolade that indicates the exceptional standard of his published work in Japanese and which is indicative of his global standing as a scholar.

The successes of Takashi, Michael and Angela reflect and reaffirm our Department’s commitment to producing out-standing research. As the staff notes section of this news-letter makes clear, our academic staff have been extremely industrious again this year. While much of our work is carried out individually, as we research in archives, librar-ies, museums, and galleries, our ideas and arguments are shaped by a collective commitment to producing excellent research and by seminars, workshops, and conferences that the Department runs to enable the sharing of ideas.

One key event in 2013 was the biennial New Zealand Historical Asssociation Conference which was hosted by the Department in late November. Staff and students from across the three programmes in the Department participat-ed in the conference, joining 180 visitors in engaging in three days of discussion and debate. A particular highlight was the evening spent at Ōtākou marae, where confer-ence attendees were welcomed into the wharenui Tamatea and one of the conference keynote lectures was held in

Hakuiao, the marae’s stunning new wharekai.

Looking ahead to next year, there will be some staffing changes in the Department. After ten-and-half years As-sociate Professor Mark Stocker is leaving us to take up a position at Te Papa (see the note on this later in the news-letter). Mark has been a positive, hard-working and en-gaging colleague and a popular teacher: we will miss him. For 2014, we are delighted that Chrissie Craig, one of our Art History graduates and an experienced tutor, will be joining us to cover Mark’s teaching in semester 1. We are also very pleased that postgraduate History students Rosi Crane and Jane McCabe will also be taking up short-term teaching contracts in 2014 to offer courses in place of those scheduled to be taught by Dr Michael Stevens and Dr Angela Wanhalla.

Finally, it is important to recognize that all of our De-partmental endeavours are supported and enabled by our hard-working administration team and as Head of Depart-ment I would like to acknowledge and thank Sue Lang, Peter Cadogan, Nicola Elliott, and Gwen Slote for their hard work and cheery smiles during the year!

On the behalf of the Department I would like to wish all of our current students, our alumni, and the Department’s many friends all the best for the holiday season and for the summer. We are already looking forward to welcom-ing our students back, first in Summer School and then in semester one 2014. I would encourage all readers of this newsletter to “like” us on Facebook – it is an excellent way to stay in touch and to learn what is happening in our Department.

Tony Ballantyne HOD

HAHTSADuring 2013 the History and Art History and Theory Stu-dents Association (HAHTSA) held two successful events. On 2 May the HAHTSA Meet and Greet enabled students and staff to socialise in a convivial atmosphere over wine, cheese, and other tasty delights. Then on 1 August the HAHTSA Annual Pub Quiz was held at Urban Factory. Our quiz master again this year was Dr Russell Johnson, and the questions were devised by HAHTSA, allowing Prof. Tom Brooking to participate (Tom had been banned because of his exceptional record of winning quizzes). HAHTSA is grateful to all our sponsors for donating goods and services that went towards prizes for the place-getting teams: University Book Shop, Film Society, Marbecks, Garden’s Crocodile Café, Headquarters Hairdressing, Hinton’s Produce, United Video, Good Earth Café, Garden Seat Café, Chopsticks 101, Scribes, Body Shop, Gardens New World, Whitcoulls. Thanks also to the enthusiastic HAHTSA committee, especially Wilbert, Gareth and Kim.


Angela’s research broadly inves-tigates the intersections between gender, race and sexuality in colo-nial history, with a specific focus on the social and cultural history of interracial intimacy and hybrid-ity within colonial cultures.

Two particular areas of interest inform her research: indigenous women’s agency in colonial history, particularly within intimate relation-ships, and assessing the impact of interracial intimacy upon indigenous communities, looking particularly at the experiences of mixed descent children, where she connects the individual experience with the dense ties of evolving state policy.

In late September the Minister of Science and Innovation Steven Joyce announced the Royal Society of New Zea-land’s new Rutherford Discovery Fellowships. These are five-year awards that recognise outstanding research and support the awardees to develop their work. It was abso-lutely fantastic that Dr Angela Wanhalla received one of these highly-competitive awards. This distinction under-lines the quality and significance of Angela’s scholarship to date and is an outstanding achievement given that these Fellowships tend to go to scholars working in the “hard” sciences. The aim of this programme is to foster a new generation of research leaders and to enhance the research of scholars producing cutting-edge knowledge within the New Zealand tertiary sector.

Angela’s award will enable her to develop a research pro-gramme around the history of marriage, love and intimacy in New Zealand. Her project aims to trace the historical dimensions of current debates about the legal definition of marriage, assessing to what extent marriage was used to demarcate access to the benefits of social citizenship, and to what degree private life was regulated by church, state, communities and families. Two MA scholarships and a

In April we received the scores for the 2011 Performance Based Research Funding Assessment, a complex exercise that assesses the performance of individual academics, academic units within Universities and Universities them-selves. Our Department, with its mix of History, Art History and Visual Culture, scored very highly: our score was high-er than any comparable History or Art History Department, making us the best performing unit of its kind in the country. Our performance also placed us 8th out of 48 units in the University of Otago. This is great news for our students too as it reaffirms that they are taught and supervised by a department that produces research of the highest quality.

That assessment of the quality of the Department was con-firmed by the evaluation published in May by Quacquarel-li Symonds (QS). This is an evaluation system that ranks Universities as well as particular subject areas on the basis of a mix of measures, including the Department's repu-tation, how it is seen by employers, and a citation index (which looks at how widely cited, on average, the research produced by departmental staff is). In the 2013 evalua-tion our Department performed brilliantly, being ranked us at 24th in the world placing us well ahead of all other New Zealand departments and ahead of the History pro-grammes at many distinguished international Universities.

Department Excels in Rankings

Rutherford Discovery Fellowship

PhD scholarship will be funded by the fellowship. The fel-lowship will allow Angela to devote most of her energy to research and writing and will enable the Department to hire excellent short-term teaching coverage.

Otago's History programme has produced a large number of scholars who have gone on to occupy permanent aca-demic positions around the world: our graduates live and teach in Berkeley, Boston, and Washington DC as well as in Canberra, Melbourne, Wellington, and Hamilton. We can now add Cambridge to that list as Dr Simon Layton has recently taken up a lectureship in the University of Cambridge's History faculty and a Fellowship at St Ca-

Appointment to University of Cambridgetharine's College. Simon was an outstanding History hon-ours student at Otago and his BA (Hons) dissertation on the suppression of piracy in the Malay world set him on a path to his PhD at Cambridge. His PhD research focused on piracy, commerce and imperial power in the Indian Ocean. Simon, who describes himself as a "piratologist", will be teaching South Asian and world history at Cambridge.


Marsden Fast-Start GrantThe department is proud to anounce that lecturer Dr Mi-chael Stevens has been awarded a Marsden Fast-Start Grant, for his research on Bluff.

The Marsden Fund takes its name from physicist Sir Er-nest Marsden (1889-1970) who made a remarkable con-tribution to science both in New Zealand and overseas. It was established by the New Zealand government in 1994 to fund excellent fundamental research. It is a contestable fund administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand on behalf of the Marsden Fund Council. Marsden Fund research benefits society as a whole by contributing to the development of researchers with knowledge, skills and ideas.

The research is not subject to government’s socio-eco-nomic priorities, but is investigator initiated. The Fund supports research excellence in science, technology, engineering and maths, social sciences and the human-ities. Competition for grants is intense. Marsden is regarded as the hallmark of excellence for research in New Zealand.

A world history of BluffNew Zealand’s seaports have always been crucial locations for exchange – connecting people and products with the world. But in ongoing reassessments of our colonial and economic past, the role of ports is largely absent. Conse-quently, our understanding of Māori history is incomplete.

As Southland’s sole deep-water port, Bluff was a key entry point for goods, people, livestock and ideas to the lower South Island. In return, primary products were dispatched to points throughout the British Empire.

Although it became an important cog in an imperial sys-tem, Bluff attracted and retained a relatively large number of Kai Tahu people. So where and how did resident Māori live and work and to what extent was this similar, or dif-ferent, to Bluff’s non-Māori residents? And if this Māori presence shaped the port’s evolution, did the port change Māori ways of life?

In exploring these questions, Michael responds to calls for regional histories of Māori economies and their transna-tional linkages. His historical case study of Bluff will cov-er the years 1800–2000 and focus strongly on the interplay between economics, place, and community formation. As a “Bluffie” of Kai Tahu descent, Dr Stevens is ideally placed to carry out a research project that is meaningful to both academics and the local inhabitants.

Funded by a Marsden Fast-Start grant, Dr Stevens will examine the way these factors sustained a robust Māori

Mike is primarily interested in knowledge borne out of cul-tural contact and colonisation in the long nineteenth-century. His PhD thesis, which drew on scholarship from the new imperial history, ethnohistory, economic history, the history of science, and religious histo-ry, examined changes and continuities in southern Kāi Tahu thought and practice as illustrated by te hopu tītī ki Rakiura—“muttonbirding”—the annual harvesting of juvenile tītī (sooty shearwaters) from islands adjacent to Stewart Island in southern New Zealand. Mike is currently reworking some of this research into a general narrative history. His more theoretical work on the other hand, much of which extends the idea of Māori modernities, is being re-worked into a series of academic journal articles.

community. He will then reassess current approaches to colonial and Māori history in light of his findings.

This project has the potential to challenge and reshape cur-rent thinking about New Zealand’s economic development and race relations.


He came to Otago’s History and Art History Department to teach medieval European papers in 2004. He has now been with the Department for ten years – most recently taking up the position of Associate Dean (Research) in the Division of Humanities.He says the prize-winning book, published in August this year by the University of Nagoya Press, and on sale in Japan, is popular and already in re-print. The book was a spin-off from earlier Marsden-funded research into the origins of European political thought.“Medieval political thought has long been considered to be impenetrable by Japanese historians, so I tried to make the book as accessible as possible and to provide a birds-eye view of the history of medieval political thought as a pro-cess in the making of European political thinking,” says Associate Professor Shogimen.“It is important to people who live in Japan to understand this – especially when you consider that Westernisation became a major part of Japanese history after the mid 19th century. It became an imperative to understand European culture in order to understand modern Japan and its histo-ry. European culture is integral to self-understanding. And its genesis was in the middle ages.”

A real highlight of 2013 was Associate Professor Takashi Shogimen’s winning of Japan’s most prestigious prize for scholars in humanities with his book, written in Japanese, on the birth of European political thought in medieval times.It was announced in Japan on Monday 11 November that Associate Professor Shogimen has won the 2013 Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities (History and Civ-ilisation Section), with his book in Japanese, Yoroppa Seiji Shiso Tanjo (The Birth of European Political Thought).The prize is awarded in Japan each year to individuals who have made “original, distinguished contributions” in hu-manities and social sciences through publications in the Japanese language – regardless of the country of residence of the author. Associate Professor Shogimen says he is delighted and honoured to receive the prize-winning plaque, and two million yen ($25,000 NZ) in prize money, which he will be awarded at a ceremony in Tokyo on 10 December.“I am honoured and proud to have won this both for my-self, and for the University of Otago. I am particularly pleased that this reflects so well on our University, which will become better known in Japan for its leading research as a result of this prize. This is a major award in Japan and always brings profile to whoever wins it, and their institu-tion,” he says.“And it generates the opportunity for me to write more books for both specialist and lay leadership.”Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Enterprise) Pro-fessor Richard Blaikie, says the announcement of the prize for Associate Professor Shogimen is “outstanding news”.“We are always very proud when our researchers achieve awards and recognition at the highest national and interna-tional levels in their disciplines,” says Professor Blaikie.“And it cannot go without mention that Takashi’s award is also a major accolade in Japan for the University of Otago generally, as our reputation for outstanding excellence in scholarship has been enhanced by the award of this most prestigious prize to one of our scholars.”Associate Professor Shogimen was born in Japan and earned his undergraduate degree in Law and Political Science at Keio University in Tokyo. With his thirst for knowledge of medieval history of the West already gar-nered through his learning in Japan, he went on to com-plete PhD studies at the University of Sheffield in the UK, becoming a research fellow at Cambridge University and specialising there in medieval European history. “Medieval political thought is fascinating because it is still relevant to modern-day society. Medieval scholars discussed some of the core problems of human life, and I discuss some of these issues in the book – tyranny and corruption, for example, and how we all deal with them,” he says.

2013 Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities

Takashi Shogimen specialises in the political thought of medieval Europe, with special attention to the transformation of political and ecclesiological discourses in the thirteenth and fourteenth cen-turies. His recent book offers a fresh reappraisal of the political thought of William of Ockham (c.1285-1347), a Franciscan the-ologian and philosopher.

Before joining the History Department at Otago, Takashi was Research Fellow at Clare Hall in the University of Cambridge and the Research Assis-tant for the Medieval Texts Editorial Committee, the British Academy. In May 2005, he was Visiting Professor at the Department of History in the Uni-versity of Helsinki, Finland and, in late 2009, he was Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science in Keio University, Tokyo, Japan. Takashi is currently a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Research Affiliate of the Centre for the History of European Discourses in the University of Queensland.


One key element of our Departmental research culture is the involvement of academic staff in a range of research networks, themes, and centres which support scholarly work on a particular set of issues or problem. One key example of this is the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture, one of the University's "flagship" research cen-tres which is based in our De-partment. In the past year, the seven historians and the art historian connected to the Cen-tre have played central roles in running the Centre's busy research programme. Dr An-gela Wanhalla was one of the co-organisers of the major con-ference that the Centre spon-sored in February on 'Colonial Objects'. This event was a tre-mendous success, bringing 120 scholars together in Dunedin to reflect on how colonialism shaped material culture and the ways in which we might understand the meaning and significance of objects from the colonial past. In March the Centre hosted a symposi-um on the 'Colonial Origins of New Zealand Government and Politics'. This was part of the 'Constitutional Conversation' that was sponsored by the Constitutional Advisory Pan-el that led a formal reapprasial of New Zealand's consti-tutional arrangements. November was a busy month for the Centre. In the lead-up to the New Zealand Historical

The Colonial Origins of New Zealand Politics and GovernmentThis conference is the Centre’s contribution to the Constitution Conversation: www.ourconstitution.org.nz. Members of the Constitutional Advisory Panel will attend and speak.

Friday 8 March 2013Barclay Theatre, Otago Museum, DunedinThis is a free but ticketed event hosted by Centre for Research on Colonial Culture at the University of Otago. Ticket enquiries to [email protected] please.

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Association Conference, the Centre ran a workshop for 15 postgraduate students from New Zealand and North America on 'Writing Histories of Empire and Colonial-ism: People and Place': this was run by Professor Tony Ballantyne and Professor Maya Jasanoff from Harvard University. In that same month, the Centre also hosted a

symposium on 'New Historical Perspectives on New Zealand and the Sea', bringing togeth-er historians, Pacific studies experts, art historians, and marine biologists. The Centre has also hosted visiting speak-ers from India and the United States and a visiting fellow, Dr Samia Khatun from the Uni-versity of Sydney. Many of these activities will result in publications: the University of Otago press will publish a volume of short illustrated es-says on colonial objects. And a volume of essays has recently appeared from one of the Cen-tre's 2013 events on the place of performance in colonial cul-ture, edited by Professor Bar-bara Brookes. It is accessible here: http://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/jnzs/issue/view/199

The Centre for Research on Colonial Culture has another full programme of events in place for next year, which will enhance its standing as a key focus for critical reflections of colonialism and New Zealand history.

Centre for Research on Colonial Culture

Children at WarThe research resulting from the Mothers’ Darlings project on the children of US servicemen and indigenous women in the South Pacific during World War Two has resulted in various conference presentations over the last two years by members of the team, with a book manuscript about to go to a press. A first for the project and indeed for the Department, the Division of Humanities and the New Zealand History Association Conference in November was the showing of an hour-length film based on some of this research, pro-duced by Steve Talley, Judy Bennett and Peggy Holter. In this documentary three “Children of the War” relate their experiences of growing up with this legacy and the search for their US parent. Judy Bennett, Angela Wanhalla and Louise Mataia-Milo (of the National University of Samoa and an Otago graduate) were involved in these studies. The film will be shown on Maori TV on Anzac Day 2014.


In addition to his role as Head of De-partment and Director of the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture, Tony Ballantyne has had a busy year with his research on the cultural history of the British empire and on colonial New Zealand. In March he convened a symposium on ‘The Colonial Origins of New Zealand Politics and Govern-ment’, in May he ran a research sym-posium with Craig Robertson (North-eastern University) on ‘Paper Work: the Materials and Practices of Modern In-formation Cultures’, and in November he convened a workshop for postgrad-uates attached to the New Zealand His-torical Association conference. In April he was invited to work with a group of Metis researchers in Ottawa to provide a comparative perspective on their ongo-ing research. In July he was the keynote speaker at the Australian Historical As-sociation at Wollongong and in Novem-ber he also gave a keynote at the Aus-tralian and New Zealand Legal History Association conference. His Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colo-nial Past (Bridget Williams Books) was shortlisted for the Ernest Scott prize for the best book on Australian and/or New Zealand history and he was the winner of the New Zealand Historical Associ-ation’s inaugural Mary Boyd Prize for the best article on New Zealand histo-ry (published between 2011 and 2013). He is looking forward to the appearance of two new books in the coming year: Empires and the Reach of the Global, co-authored with Antoinette Burton, is in the final stages of production with Harvard University Press and his En-tanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori and the Question of the Body has just entered into production with Duke University Press.

October 10th saw the Dunedin launch at the Hocken Library of a book edited by Tim Bayliss-Smith and Judy Ben-nett, An Otago Storeman in Solomon Islands: The Diary of William Crossan, copra trader, 1885-86, Canberra: ANU E-press, 2012. Hocken Library holds the original diary.

Barbara Brookes had a productive leave in the second half of 2012 which

included research in London, San Die-go and Hawaii for her project on the late nineteenth century travels of Dr Anna Longshore Potts. In March 2013 Barbara gave a paper on that research at a symposium in Sydney, held in honour of Simon Szreter, entitled ‘Sex-uality, Health and Population’ , part of which which was held in the stunning setting of the Quarantine Station on the Head of Sydney Harbour. Together with two Canadian colleagues, Barbara has recently edited a collection entitled Bodily Subjects: Historical Essays on Gender and Health which should ap-pear in 2014. In 2013, Barbara became joint editor, with Tony Ballantyne, of the New Zealand Journal of History. Barbara was delighted to see a number of former students at the NZ Historical Association Conference held at Otago in November.

Tom Brooking has had a busy and pro-ductive year. Two books were published in November. The first is a new edition of Environmental Histories of New Zea-land edited with Eric Pawson, published by Otago University Press, featuring several new chapters including one by the Department’s very own Michael Stevens and another by a former PhD student Dr James Beattie of Waikato University. The second is Unpacking the Kists: The Scots in New Zealand co-authored with Dr Brad Patterson and Associate-Professor Jim McAloon of Victoria University and published by McGill-Queens University Press in Montreal. The Seddon biography is now in production with Penguin and will move from the status of legend to reality in September next year (2014). This project relates directly to a course on Political Biography that he will teach at Fourth Year in 2014. Listen out for various interviews on the Radio in re-lation to all 3 books. Tom also gave a keynote on Seddon and the Pacific at the New Zealand Studies Association con-ference at Raboud University in Nijme-gen, Netherlands, and presented a paper at the NZHA conference in Dunedin on Seddon and scenery preservation. He has recently stepped down as President of the NZHA but is busily involved with both the Mayor’s and Toitu Committees

Staff Newsappointed to assist with commemora-tions of the First World War now that the centenary of that great tragedy and conflagration is nigh.

This semester Judith Collard has been on RSL, working on a book on the work on the medieval monk Mat-thew Paris. During this time she spent two months in Europe where she had the pleasure of presenting a paper at the Thirteenth-Century England con-ference at Aberystwyth in Wales, as well as giving a paper at the Mediating Cityscapes conference at The Hague on the work of Australian print-mak-er, Neil Emmerson. Judith was also able to attend the Digipal conference at King’s College, London Universi-ty. During this time she also examined manuscripts in Oxford and Cambridge, as well as London. Probably the high-light of Judith’s trip was her visit to Oslo where she examined a picture attributed to Matthew Paris, as well as meeting up with medievalists at Oslo University. In addition she was able to fulfil a long time ambition to see the Oseberg and Gokstad ships, as well as visiting a Stave Church.

In 2013 Angela McCarthy introduced a new course on Modern Irish History and gave her inaugural professorial lec-ture (pending since 2008!). She present-ed invited papers to local history groups and conferences in Scotland and Ireland and was a keynote speaker at the Scots in the American West conference, or-ganised by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. As Visiting Profes-sor at the University of Edinburgh, An-gela was lead developer of a successful Economic and Social Research Coun-cil seminar series funding application (with colleagues at Edinburgh and Hull) on ‘Scotland’s diasporas in compara-tive international perspective’. She has been contracted to publish articles in the Oxford Handbook of Disability History and in a volume on empire and devi-ance, and is delighted to have success-fully supervised two PhD students to completion during the year: Erin Grant and Maree Dawson (University of Wai-kato). Thanks to a UORG, Angela will advance research next year on her cur-


rent project which examines James Tay-lor, ‘father of the Ceylon tea enterprise’, and the Scots in Ceylon.

Professor Hilary Radner, coordina-tor of the Visual Culture Programme, has had a busy year, including confer-ence presentations in Rome at Roma Tre University on the work of New Zealand director Gaylene Preston and at the Australasian Association of European History Association, held this year at Victoria University, Wel-lington, on the French historical film. Her co-edited volume A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema for Blackwell-Wiley is currently in press and she has published articles on a range of topics from celebrity in New Zealand to the films of François Truf-faut. Recently elected to the Council of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Socie-ty, she hopes to work towards fostering a greater awareness of the arts in the community, in particular with regard to the developing area of time-based in-stallations.

Mark Seymour began 2013 in Viet-nam, where he and his partner had a holiday travelling by train from Saigon to Hanoi. That was followed by a month of research in Italy, divided between a visiting fellowship at the Univeristy of Cagliari, on the island of Sardinia, and the parliamentary archives in Rome, investigating the preparation of Italy’s 1890 criminal code. With colleagues from Victoria and Auckland, he co-or-ganised this year’s Australasian Asso-ciation for European History biennial conference, held in Wellington in early July. This year the theme was ‘Fault-lines’, and participants investigated the way historic cleavages in Europe, such as class, nationalism, east-west and north-south, have been complicated by the political, sociological, and econom-ic developments of the present century. He published an article entitled ‘Con-testing Masculinity in Post-Unification Italy’ in Gender and History.

Takashi Shogimen’s primary research focuses on the history of medieval Eu-ropean political thought with special attention to the transformation of po-

litical and ecclesiological discourses in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Takashi is currently working on two monographs in English: one explores the interface of medical science and political thought in medieval Europe as manifested by a variety of metaphors of the body politic. For this research Takashi has deployed the cognitive linguistic theory of metaphor and con-ceptual mapping thereby developing a new method for the historical recon-struction of intellectual contexts such as the medical context of past political writings. The other monograph pro-ject constitutes an examination of the relationship between the idea of peace and military knowledge in medieval political thought, exploring in particu-lar how the ideas of ancient Roman military thinkers such as Vegetius and Frontinus were integrated into medie-val European political thinking, which – it has been conventionally believed – was determined paradigmatically by Aristotelian and Augustinian ideas. The two research projects have been supported by the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand.Takashi has also been writing on mod-ern Japanese intellectual history with some focus on the life and thought of Yanaihara Tadao (1893-1961), a prom-inent economist and Christian thinker. Takashi has produced articles on Ya-naihara’s patriotism and pacifism and their intellectual and political contexts. He is writing up a short book (in Jap-anese) on the ‘Yanaihara Incident’ in 1937, the de facto expulsion of Yanai-hara from the Imperial University of Tokyo where he was a professor due to his anti-militarist extramural speech.The exploration into the two intellec-tual traditions, European and Japanese, has led to the third line of investiga-tion: comparative studies of political thought. Takashi is increasingly in-terested in the cultural specificities of the ways in which the ideas which are established as belonging to a ‘home’ intellectual tradition encounter foreign ideas in the European and Japanese contexts. He has also engaged actively in collaborative research in this field. He is currently working with Vicki Spencer of Otago’s Politics Depart-

Staff Newsment towards an edited volume on Tol-eration in Comparative Perspective.

John Stenhouse spoke at an interna-tional conference entitled ‘Writing global histories of science, technology and medicine’ at New York University, Abu Dhabi in May 2013. In September and October, while on RSL overseas, he presented seminars and lectures at the Queen’s University, Belfast, and at the University of St. Andrew’s.

Michael Stevens taught his special topic 200-level course on the History of Māori Politics for the second time in semester one, and along with Angela Wanhalla co-taught the department’s new 100-level New Zealand history course. In semester two he taught a special topic course entitled ‘Encoun-ters: New Zealand, 1769-1873’. This focussed on key sites and episodes of cultural encounter, mainly in northern and southern New Zealand, and proved to be popular with students.Mike submitted preliminary research proposals to both the Royal Socie-ty’s Marsden Fund and Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga early in semester one and was invited to submit a full pro-posal in each instance. As highlighted elsewhere in this newsletter, this led to him being awarded a three-year Fast-Start project grant in October, which will begin on 1 March 2014.In between writing these grant pro-posals, Mike attended and presented a paper in Hamilton at He Rau Tumu Kōrero, an annual gathering of Māori historians. He also completed a new chapter for Making a New Land—the updated Environmental Histories of New Zealand—co-edited by Can-terbury’s Eric Pawson and our very own Tom Brooking. This book was launched at the conclusion of the New Historical Association’s biennial con-ference, successfully hosted by the de-partment.As well as being on the NZHA con-ference organising committee, Mike presented a paper as part of a panel that included Dr Jonathan West and David Haines, fellow graduates of the department. Mike also overhauled and relaunched the NZHA’s website early


in 2013 and administered the new blog embedded within it. Finally, Mike presented a paper at ‘New Historical Perspectives of New Zealand and the Sea’, a one-day symposium on mari-time history hosted by the department and the CRoCC following the NZHA conference.

In the past twelve months Alexander Trapeznik has completed a book man-uscript: Dunedin’s Warehouse Precinct. Lavishly illustrated with archival and contemporary photographs the book examines Dunedin’s old waterfront buildings, most of which were built in the late nineteenth century during Dun-edin’s industrial golden age. It will be published as an E-Book (his first!) by Genre Books in February 2014.Furthermore, Alex was able to com-plete a co-authored article entitled: ‘Each in his narrow cell for ever laid: Dunedin’s Southern Cemetery and its counterparts.’ It has been accepted for publication in the next issue of Public History Review (2013). This article compares aspects of the design, layout and purpose of a range of historic New Zealand urban cemeteries with the Southern Cemetery in Dunedin. Com-plementing this piece of scholarship is another co-authored paper entitled: ‘Laying the Victorians to Rest: Funer-als, Memorials and the Funeral Busi-ness in Nineteenth-Century Dunedin.’ It will be published in a forthcoming issue of Australian Economic Histo-ry Review. Most studies of death deal mainly with either the physical aspects of burial practices or with the cultural aspects of mourning and bereavement. This article seeks to integrate the two by means of considering the business-es that catered for the demand created by funerals and mourning in the second half of the nineteenth century. Finally, in the field of Russian history his article entitled: ‘Samovars. The Art of Tula Metal Workers’ will be published in the next issue of the New Zealand Slavonic Journal. Apart from weap-ons, Tula was, and still is, a producer of world-famous water boilers known as samovars. Alex has also been reappoint-ed Associate Dean (Graduate Studies) for the Division of Humanities until 2016.

In 2013 Auckland University Press published Angela Wanhalla’s book, Matters of the Heart: A History of In-terracial Marriage in New Zealand, which hit the shelves in September. Angela’s book is the major outcome of a Fast-Start Marsden Grant award-ed to her in 2007 and constitutes the first major survey of Māori-Pākeha marriage in New Zealand. At the end of September Angela was awarded a prestigious 5-year Rutherford Dis-covery Fellowship. These fellowships were created in 2010 and are funded by the Ministry of Science and Inno-vation with the specific goal of retain-ing and developing New Zealand’s talented early to mid-career research-ers. Angela’s award will allow her to fund two MA scholarships and a PhD scholarship and enable her to build a research programme around the his-tory of marriage, love and intimacy in New Zealand. She has also been in-volved in co-organising three confer-ences during 2013: Colonial Objects in February, which was the inaugural conference of the University’s Centre for Research on Colonial Culture; the New Zealand Historical Association Conference in November; and the Aus-tralian and New Zealand Legal History Association Conference also in No-vember. At the end of November An-gela began Research and Study Leave. During her 6-months of RSL she will be working on completing research for a book about the experiences of New Zealand’s GI war brides.

In 2013, Vanessa B. Ward enjoyed teaching HIST211 Inventing Tradi-tion in Modern Japan and HIST314 State and Society in Twentieth-centu-ry Japan. She also served as the De-partmental liaison officer for Student Exchange and the staff contact for the History and Art History and Theory Students Association. Vanessa was an active member of Asian Migra-tions Research Theme, coordinating the visit to the University of Otago of Professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki (School of Culture, History & Lan-guage, College of the Asia & Pacific at the Australian National University) between 14-18 August on the Theme’s

Staff NewsVisiting Scholars Scheme. Her essay ‘Journeys in Thought: Takeda Kiyoko and the Promotion of U.S.-Japan In-tellectual Exchange’ appeared in Asian Cultural Studies (39, 2013) and her review of Kirsten Cather’s The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan (2012) appeared in Japanese Stud-ies (33:2, Sept. 2013). An essay on Shōwashi, a leftist postwar Japanese history book, was published in Script & Print in June (37:2, 2013). Vanes-sa joined the Executive Committee of the New Zealand Asian Studies Soci-ety as Secretary in January and pre-sented a paper on the innovative post-war Japanese intellectual group, The Institute for the Science of Thought, at its twentieth biennial conference in November.

In addition to her promotion to Asso-ciate Professor, Erika Wolf organ-ized “The Art of Shigeyuki Kihara: A Research Symposium” in conjunction with an mid-career survey of theart-ist’s work at the Hocken Collections. Scholars from New Zealand, Australia, Japan and the USA broadly consid-ered Kihara’s creative work, artistic development, and the critical issues that it raises from diverse disciplinary perspectives. In October, she partic-ipated in the international workshop “Photography and Visual Orders in the History of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union”, organized by the Col-laborative Research Center “Threat-ened Orders” of Tübingen University and held at the German Historical In-stitute in Moscow. With funding from an Otago Research Grant, she is pres-ently working on the manuscript for the book “Photography and Russia”, which will be published by Reaktion Press as part of their photography se-ries “Exposure.” She is also working on a book and exhibition project on the Soviet photomontage artist Aleksandr Zhitomirsky in collaboration with the Ne Boltai Collection of 20th Century Propaganda (Prague).

Erik Olssen is currently proofing his latest book, a photographic essay en-titled ‘Working Lives’ to be published by Otago University Press.


The Department has embraced social media as an important way of communicating with students and staying in contact with alumni. Check out our page and ‘like’ it:http://www.facebook.com/OtagoHistoryAndArtHistory

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In the middle of this year, Tony Ballantyne and Barbara Brookes took over the editorship of the New Zealand Journal of History. Since its establishment in 1967, the NZJH has been the flagship of New Zealand historical scholarship and it has always been edited by historians from the University of Auckland, so this shift is a very significant change. The Uni-versity of Auckland retains ownership of the NZJH, but Tony and Barbara will be the editors for the next 6 years. The first issue has just come out. If you are interested in becoming a subscriber you can email the editors: [email protected]

New Zealand Journal of History

In March 2014 Mark Stocker is leaving the Department of History & Art History to take up the newly established position of Curator (Historical) at Te Papa. His areas of expertise will be broad - covering historical international art before 1900, particularly European - and will require him to be 'the champion for this area of the collection', as well as engaging professionally with outside experts in the field. The new position places a major emphasis on enhancing Te Papa's reputation for scholarship and publishing, as well as collection management and development, and working on an exhibitions programme in the years to come. A further important dimension is in the area of interpretation and communication, where Mark's teaching and lecturing experience at Otago should stand him in good stead. Te Papa is strongly inter-disciplinary and here the 'mix' of History and Art History, which Mark has always championed, should prove relevant. Mark says: 'Over the past ten and a half years, Otago and this department in particular have provided a wonderful environment for my productivity in scholarship and teaching. I hope to apply these skills to this challenging and exciting new position. I will leave the department with some sadness - I have some excellent colleagues and lifelong friends here. I feel committed to promote Otago's profile at every opportunity and I hope to enjoy frequent visits from you all.' The department wishes Mark all the best for his new role and looks forward to maintaining connections with him in Wellington.

Mark Stocker off to Te Papa

Theses CompletedThe following students have completed their post-graduate studies in 2013:

• Hannah Burgess “The idealised style of Vesalius’s Fabrica illustrations: art, nature and aesthetics”

• Clement Da Gama “Un sous-genre parasitaire: continuite et changements dans le female gothic”

• Erin Grant “The pipe band diaspora: Bands, bonnie las-sies, and Scottish associational culture, 1918-2012”

• John McLane “Setting a Barricade Against the East Wind: Western Polynesia and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic”

Due to Associate Professor Mark Stocker taking up his new position at Te Papa and the funding successes of Dr Wanhalla and Dr Stevens there will be some shifts in the Department's teaching offerings for 2014.

For Art History:• Chrissie Craig will now teach ARTH 214: Renaissance

Art in Italy in the first semester.• a contract lecturer, yet to be appointed, will teach

ARTH 217: New Zealand Art in the 20th Century in semester two.

• ARTH 325/425: Art Controversies in NZ will not be taught.

For History:• in semester one, HIST 332: Encounters will be re-

placed by HIST 331: 19th Century Nature and Cul-ture, to be taught be Rosi Crane

• HIST 401: topics in New Zealand History will now be taught by Professor Tom Brooking and the course will focus on political biography.

• in semester two, Jane McCabe will teach HIST 303: Modern India

We are looking forward to Rosi, Jane and Chrissie joining our teaching staff next year!

Teaching Changes 2014

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