Professor Belich kicks off 'New Work, New Zealand' series

Victoria University Professor of History, James Belich, will next week explain why English speaking societies grew much faster than others in the long 19th century.

His talk, entitled 'The Settler Revolution in the Long Nineteenth Century', is the first in a series of seminars by Victoria's Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies.

"This new seminar series is an exciting initiative. It's about time we exported one or two ideas from New Zealand, and put New Zealand research into a global context. My seminar is going to be at Te Herenga Waka Marae, which will be a bit of a homecoming for me. I used to be an honorary lecturer in Maori at Victoria University," says Professor Belich.

The 'New Work, New Zealand' series, which aims to showcase new approaches to New Zealand studies, will be on Wednesdays during May and June 2008.

Professor Belich recently joined Victoria University's Stout Research Centre, which is a leading centre for innovative New Zealand studies research.

He is currently writing a book about transnational settler histories, due out in 2009. "While the book is anglo-focussed, it tries to understand historically the reasons for this growth rather than assuming it is intrinsic superiority of any kind," says Professor Belich.

Professor Belich's seminar will be at Te Herenga Waka Marae, 46 Kelburn Parade, Wellington, on 7 May 2008, 4.10-5.30pm.

Please RSVP by 1 May to stout-centre@vuw.ac.nz.

The other seminars in the series, which are all open to the public, will be from 4.10-5.30pm each Wednesday at the Stout Research Centre, 12 Waiteata Road. There is no need to RSVP. They are:

14 May: Dr Vincent O'Malley "Cultural Encounter on the New Zealand Frontier: Rethinking Aspects of the Meeting of Maori and Pakeha Before 1840". A large body of international literature concerning issues of cultural encounter on the colonial frontier today views the subject less in terms of the diffusion of European influence and ideas upon indigenous peoples than as a two-way process of exchange, 'entanglement' and dialogue. This paper explores aspects of that process within the New Zealand context.

21 May: Dr Alice Te Punga Somerville: "When Romeo met Tusi: Brown-on-Brown action in Aotearoa". Her current book project, Once Were Pacific, investigates Maori articulations of connection with the Pacific. In this paper, she draws on a broad range of texts (poetry and fiction; the TV show The Market; and Rongo, the 1973 one-off Polynesian Panthers/Nga Tamatoa newspaper) in order to explore the complicated dynamic of connection and derision that shapes the relationships between Maori and Pasifika communities in Aotearoa.

28 May: Dr Sandy Callister "The Hidden Faces of War: New Zealand's Great War Medical Photography". The medical photography of severely wounded soldiers is unknown and unseen in New Zealand's Great War historiography. The Macalister collection holds the records of 295 New Zealand soldiers who underwent reconstructive plastic surgery for facial injuries. The resurfacing of this hitherto unknown New Zealand medical archive allows us to see what has been hidden from this country's war memory.

4 June: Rebecca Rice "Lost in Transportation: Inter-Institutional Histories of Colonial New Zealand Art". Born of a much-debated union of New Zealand's National Art Gallery and Museum, Te Papa has a unique ancestry. Less well-known is that its collections are historically linked to those of the Alexander Turnbull Library. By charting the fate of colonial art within these institutions, she returns attention to their intertwined histories prior to their being construed as more tightly bounded entities in the twentieth century.

11 June: Associate Professor Jane Stafford "Administering the Literary Empire: Edmund Gosse, Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu". This paper discusses the relationship between Edmund Gosse, literary critic and cultural commissar, and the Indian writers Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu. How did Gosse see India, Indian material and the Indian author? What was his role as literary patron and facilitator? And what can such a study tells us of the participation of the native writer in the literary empire?

18 June: Dr Teresia Teaiwa "Fiji/Women/Soldiers: Gendered and Militarized Imaginations". 2008 marks the 20th anniversary of women's admission into the Fiji Military Forces (FMF). Since the late 1990s, Fiji has also become a significant source for British Army military recruitment. This talk focuses on a selection of print media representations from the last two decades which document moments and processes of militarization in Fiji and include women in their frames.