Professor Tony Ballantyne
Professor Barbara Brookes
Professor Barbara Brookes is an award winning historian who has written widely on the history of women, gender relations and the history of medicine. Her 2016 A History of Women in New Zealand begins with the journey of her Irish-born mother and father and three siblings to New Zealand. That story, in part, ignited her interest in history since she grew up looking on family photographs of a place far away from which her family came.
Email barbara.brookes@otago.ac.nz
Seán Brosnahan
Seán is descended from three major streams of Irish Catholic settlement in South Canterbury, Otago and Southland. A graduate of Canterbury and Massey universities, he has written extensively on Scottish and Irish migration and settlement in southern New Zealand with a particular focus on sectarianism and on cultural and religious topics. For over thirty years, Seán has been a history curator at Toitῡ Otago Settlers Museum, New Zealand's leading specialist social history museum. He guest lectures in a number of Otago history courses and from 2009–2011 co-taught History 328: Irish and Scottish Migrations in the 19th and 20th centuries with Professor Angela McCarthy. In 2013 he was named Ceann Fine (clan chieftain) at a World Gathering of Clan Brosnan at Castleisland, Co Kerry.
Seán's website to share his historical work
Email Sean.Brosnahan@dcc.govt.nz
Associate Professor Sharon Crozier-De Rosa
Associate Professor Sharon Crozier-De Rosa is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wollongong (UOW), Australia. Originally from Armagh, she obtained a PhD from Flinders University, Adelaide, and then worked as a Historical Consultant for a Commission of Inquiry investigating the historical sexual abuse of children in state care in South Australia. On her return to academia, she was awarded an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Deakin University before taking up her current continuing position at UOW.
Associate Professor Crozier-De Rosa's research focuses on exploring the physical and emotional tactics deployed by women activists in intersecting nationalist and feminist campaigns across Britain and its colonies (especially Ireland and Australia) and the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. She also traces the memory of gendered activisms – including militant and violent activisms – in their national and transnational contexts. Her project, Memory-Keepers: Women Activists' Strategies to Document their History and Preserve their Own Memory, has been awarded a 2020 National Library of Australia Research Fellowship. She is also working on a new project that reimagines the way in which Irish gender histories and gender and social movements histories are written with Eamon Cleary Professor of Irish Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, Professor Sonja Tiernan.
Associate Professor Crozier-De Rosa's recent books include Shame and the Anti-Feminist Backlash: Britain, Ireland and Australia, 1890–1920 (2018); Remembering Women's Activism (2019), co-authored with Professor Vera Mackie; and Sources for the History of Emotions: A Guide, co-edited with Professor Peter Stearns and Associate Professor Katie Barclay (2020). She is Deputy Editor of the international journal, Women's History Review and blogs at The Militant Woman (The political emotions & emotional politics of women's activism).
Visit The Militant Woman blog site
Visit here for more details on Associate Professor Sharon Crozier-De Rosa
Professor Janine Hayward
Janine Hayward is a professor of politics. Her primary research is New Zealand politics, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi, constitutional, and environmental politics in Aotearoa. She also has a comparative interest in New Zealand politics, specifically the way national constitutions like New Zealand's are challenged to recognise and accommodate Indigenous and minority peoples. Her research and teaching in this field includes comparisons of New Zealand with Canada (and Indigenous peoples) and the UK (in relation to Scotland) and other examples from the Commonwealth.
Email janine.hayward@otago.ac.nz
Emeritus Professor Peter Kuch
Peter Kuch is an Emeritus Professor of Irish Studies. He holds an Honours degree from the University of Wales and an M.Litt and D.Phil from Oxford, where he studied with Richard Ellmann and John Kelly. He has held posts at the University of Newcastle, Australia; Université de Caen, France; and the University of New South Wales, Australia; and been a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University; at Trinity College, Dublin; and at the Keogh Naughton Institute at Notre Dame (USA). He has published more than 60 refereed articles, book chapters and books on Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Irish theatre, Irish literature, Irish and Australian film, literary theory, Australian literature, and Irish/Australian history and presented conference papers and given lectures in over 30 countries. He is a commissioning editor for the Irish Studies Review (Routledge) and is on the Editorial Board of several journals.
Peter's most recent book, Irish Divorce/Joyce's Ulysses (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) has received plaudits from Professors Declan Kiberd ("a tour de force"), Finn Fordham ("original, provocative, compelling"), Luke Gibbons ("exemplary scholarship") and Terence Killeen ("Hugely impressive. … changes the balance of forces in the [Blooms'] relationship, and in the whole concept of marriage in Ireland"). He is currently engaged in writing a cultural history of the performance of Irish theatre in New Zealand and Australia from 1789 to 1930 and is the representative for those countries on the international organising committee of the Irish Theatrical Diaspora Project.
Email peter.kuch@otago.ac.nz
Dr Maebh Long
Dr Maebh Long comes from Cork and is currently a Senior Lecturer in the English Programme at the University of Waikato. Maebh's research interests include modernist and contemporary literature from Ireland, Britain, and Oceania.
Maebh is the author of award-winning works on Flann O'Brien – Assembling Flann O'Brien (Bloomsbury, 2014) and The Collected Letters of Flann O'Brien (Dalkey Archive Press, 2018) – and is one of the general editors of The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O'Brien Studies. She is a co-investigator of the Oceanian Modernism project and co-editor, with Matthew Hayward, of New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific (Routledge 2020). She is currently completing a monograph on Pacific literature, Pacific universities, and modernism with Matthew. She is intrigued by connections between Ireland and the Pacific, and a forthcoming book chapter by Maebh in the Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture examines the presence of Pacific tropes in representations of Irish islands.
Maebh is also in the early stages of a project, supported by the Marsden fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand, which examines the ways 'immunity', as a heightened desire for bodily and political security and exemption, became a contagious metaphor for modernist writers in Ireland, Britain, New Zealand and Australia.
Email maebh.long@waikato.ac.nz
Dr Emer Lyons
Emer Lyons is a lesbian writer and academic from West Cork living in New Zealand. In 2021, she graduated with a creative/critical PhD from the University of Otago in lesbian poetry in Ireland and New Zealand. From 2021 to 2022, she was the Irish studies postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies. Her critical and creative writing has been published worldwide in Meridians, College Literature, The Journal of New Zealand Literature, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly and more.
Email: emer.lyons@otago.ac.nz
Associate Professor Thomas McLean
Thomas McLean is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Otago and a specialist in nineteenth-century British art and literature. He is the editor of Further Letters of Joanna Baillie (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), author of The Other East and Nineteenth Century British Literature: Imagining Poland and the Russian Empire (Palgrave, 2012), and co-editor with Ruth Knezevich of Jane Porter's 1803 novel Thaddeus of Warsaw (Edinburgh, 2019).
The recipient of research fellowships from Harvard, Yale, UCLA , and ANU , he has written on art, music, and literature for The Migrationist, The Conversation UK, and Los Angeles Review of Books.
Email thomas.mclean@otago.ac.nz
Associate Professor Grace Moore
Associate Professor Grace Moore belongs to the English and Linguistics programme at Otago. For CISS, she teaches ENGL 241/341 Irish-Scots Gothic and the Gothic as Genre.
Grace is a Victorian scholar with research interests in the Environmental Humanities, colonial settler fiction, crime writing, animal studies, and Neo-Victorianism. She has published articles on the work of Robert Louis Stevenson. She is at present working on a book about Anthony Trollope, travel-writing and the environment, which includes a section on the Irish Famine.
Grace also works on settlers and bushfire narratives, and has edited collections on Victorian crime, and piracy. Her publications include the co-edited collection Victorian Environments (Palgrave, 2019), and The Victorian Novel in Context (Continuum, 2012). Grace's book Dickens and Empire was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's Award for Literary Scholarship. She is the Victorian section editor for the online Literary Encyclopedia.
Email grace.moore@otago.ac.nz
Associate Professor Hugh Morrison
Dr Hugh Morrison's father's ancestors hailed directly from Ballymena, Northern Ireland, while his Scottish links are familial (Mackie) and clan (Morrison, Isle of Lewis) and through marriage (his wife's father came from Banton, North Lanarkshire). Hugh grew up amidst the hybrid Scottish culture of Otago and is currently an Associate Professor in the College of Education, University of Otago.
Hugh's research focuses on New Zealand and British world religious history, with a particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth century Protestant missionary movement and its relationship to children, literature and education. In particular, he is currently working on Scottish world children and the missionary movement, through a comparative focus on the New Zealand Presbyterian Church and the Church of Scotland. Here “children” are considered collectively as agents (supporters), subjects, and participants (children of missionaries and their legacies).
Related publications include articles in the Journal of Family History (42, 2017), the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (Spring 2019) and Studies in Church History (55, 2019). He also has an ongoing interest in the cultural pathways that historically existed between Scottish and New Zealand Presbyterian theological institutions, and on changing cultural identities enacted through missionary families of mixed Scottish / New Zealand origins. A further project, in collaboration with Dr Karen Lowing, University of Stirling, will investigate “how New Zealand children find/encounter 'Scottishness' in and beyond the classroom”.
Hugh has been a visiting fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where he also presented research on Scottish identity and New Zealand missionary families to the Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies. In New Zealand he has taught on connections between the Scottish diaspora and Protestant missionary families to various branches of the University of the Third Age.
Email hugh.morrison@otago.ac.nz
Dr Sarah Sharp
Sarah Sharp is a lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen and Deputy Director of the Research Institute for Irish and Scottish Studies. Between 2016 and 2017 she was a Leverhulme Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at Otago. She has previously held funding from bodies including the Irish Research Council, Wolfson Foundation and Fulbright Commission, and has worked in New Zealand, Ireland and the USA. Her research focuses on ideas of nation and identity in nineteenth-century Scottish writing with an increasing focus on transnational and transperipheral contexts. She has published on James Hogg, settler colonialism, migrant diaries, crime writing and the Scottish-Australian writer Catherine Helen Spence. Her first book Kirkyard Romanticism explores ideas of death and nation in early nineteenth-century Scottish writing and will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2024. She is an editor of the upcoming Routledge Companion to Scottish Literature, an assistant editor for the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, and a volume co-editor for the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry.
Associate Professor John Stenhouse
John Stenhouse is an Associate Professor in the History Programme, University of Otago, where he teaches European and New Zealand history, the history of science and intellectual history. Of Scottish descent on both sides, he likes wearing pink shirts and tartan ties. He is currently researching connections between Scotland and Otago, focusing on the ways in which Free Church Presbyterian visions of the “godly commonwealth” shaped Otago and New Zealand history. Scottish missionaries also figure prominently in another research project on missionary knowledge-making from the early church to the twenty-first century.
Recent publications include, “Missionary science,” in H. R. Slotten, R. L. Numbers & D. N. Livingstone eds., The Cambridge history of science (Vol. 8): Modern science in national, transnational, and global context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (2020), pp. 90-107; and “Christian missionaries, science, and the complexity thesis in the nineteenth-century world,” in B. Lightman (Ed.), Rethinking history, science and religion: An exploration of conflict and the complexity principle. (pp. 65-82). Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press (2019), pp. 65-82.
Email john.stenhouse@otago.ac.nz
Dr Rory Sweetman
Dr Rory Sweetman is Irish-born New Zealander who holds degrees in history from Dublin and Cambridge. He has written extensively on the historical links between Ireland and New Zealand, on sectarianism, politics and religion in the 19th and early 20th centuries. For six years he taught courses in modern Irish history at the University of Otago. His latest book is Defending Trinity College Dublin, Easter 1916: Anzacs and the Rising (Four Courts Press, 2019). He has previously written on the history of one of New Zealand's oldest secondary schools, Otago Boys' High School 1863-2013 (Dunedin, 2013) and worked on biographical studies of Patrick Moran, the first Catholic bishop of Dunedin 1869-95, and Henry William Cleary, editor of New Zealand Tablet 1898-1910 and Catholic bishop of Auckland 1910–29.
Email rory@rorysweetman.com
Associate Professor Paul Tankard
Paul Tankard is associate professor of English at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. His research concentrates on the 18th-century Scottish writer James Boswell, and his biographical subject the British critic Samuel Johnson. His pioneering edition of selections from Boswell's journalism, Facts and Inventions (Yale UP, 2014), was in 2018 awarded the Mitchell Prize for Documentary Editing by the Bibliographical Society of America.
Paul edits the Papers of the Johnson Society of Australia. In 2017 he was Academic Visiting Scholar at the University of St Andrews, and spoke at the Boswell Book Festival of Biography and Memoir, at Dumfries House, Ayrshire. He lectures and supervises work on the Belfast-born writer C.S. Lewis, and in 2011 recovered a lost interview with him from 1961 (reported in the TLS, 2011), and also works on Lewis's fellow Oxford-based fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien. He has also given classes on the 19th-century Scottish writer George MacDonald.
Recent and forthcoming publications include the essay collection, Marginal Notes: Social Reading in the Literal Margins (Palgrave, 2021), co-edited with Patrick Spedding, major articles on Boswell's use of anonymity, Johnson's twentieth-century reputation, and a survey of Johnson's journalism for The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson. He is interested in literary genre, paratextuality and the culture of reading.
Email paul.tankard@otago.ac.nz
Professor Sonja Tiernan
Sonja Tiernan is the national coordinator for the Irish Humanities Alliance based at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. Sonja was the Eamon Cleary Professor of Irish Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Otago from 2019 - 2023. She studied at University College Dublin and has held visiting fellowships at the National Library of Ireland; Trinity College Dublin; Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame; School of Irish Studies, Concordia University Canada and was awarded a Moore Institute visiting fellowship at the University of Galway.
Professor Tiernan has received funding from prestigious sources in support of her research, including from the Irish Research Council, the Royal Irish Academy, the National Endowment of the Humanities USA and the National University of Ireland.
Professor Tiernan's research interests lie primarily within the field of modern Irish history, with a particular focus on social and gender politics. She has published widely in these areas including her monograph, The History of Marriage Equality in Ireland (2020), and her collection, Irish Women's Speeches Vol II: A Rich Chorus of Voices in November 2022, a sister companion to the best-selling book, Irish Women's Speeches: Voices that Rocked the System. These anthologies showcase the stirring contributions that Irish women have made both to modern Irish society and to global development.
Dr Ben Wilkie
Dr Ben Wilkie is an Honorary Associate at La Trobe University, Australia. He has researched and written widely on the historical relationships between Scotland, Australia, and the British Empire. His first book, The Scots in Australia, 1788-1938, was published by Boydell & Brewer in 2017.
Ben has been particularly interested in Scottish social networks, business connections, migrations, and culture in the diaspora. In 2019, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, where he began research on Scottish commercial activity in Malawi. In 2014 he was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and between 2013 and 2017 he was a Lecturer in Australian Studies at Deakin University.
Ben completed his PhD at Monash University in 2014: his thesis was entitled Weaving the Tartan: Culture, Imperialism, and Scottish Identities in Australia. His undergraduate honours dissertation was Evolving Identities: The Scots in Hamilton 1830–1920. Ben's research also covers Australian environmental history, particularly that of western Victoria, Australia, and his second book, Gariwerd: An Environmental History of the Grampians, won a Victorian Community History Award in 2020.
Email b.wilkie@latrobe.edu.au