Resources
Research in New Zealand
Look up our entries that are aimed to be more specific and framed around supporting academic research.
Read MoreClemency is the deputy chair of the national committee representing the country in the Division of History of Science and Technology of the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.
Hugh is working with other members of the network on a bid for the International Congress of History of Science and Technology to meet in Dunedin, New Zealand in 2025. He is the chair of the national committee representing the country in the Division of History of Science and Technology of the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.
Ella Arbury completed a PhD in 2020 at the University of Auckland that combined medical and architectural history. Her MA thesis was a history of breastfeeding in New Zealand from 1900 to 1963. Her PhD thesis was about the influence of ideas about health on the design (both interior and exterior) of Māori and Pākehā houses in Auckland from 1918 to 1949. Her research interests include medical history, architectural history and twentieth century New Zealand social and cultural history.
My research covers three areas: science and culture in Victorian England, domestic technology and housework in 20th-century Western Australia; and the development of European science in New Zealand. The former is culminating in two books, The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science (Chicago, 2018), and vol. 3 of the Correspondence of John Tyndall (edited, with Jeremiah Rankin and Michael Reidy; forthcoming Pittsburgh, 2017). My work covers biography, institutions, rhetoric, and scientific controversies and often spreads into social history and religious history. In 2012 I retired from the History Department of the University of Auckland. I had previously taught social science methodology at Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia and mathematics at Victoria University of Wellington.
I am a mainly retired computer scientist with a long-standing interest in the history of computing and networking. I have worked particularly on Turing as a computer designer, his former boss John Womersley, and on Internet history.
Developed displays on the history of computing, and website, at U of Auckland. Interested in horse race gambling, the totalisator, and machinery to support it. Have a particular interest in the contributions of Alan Turing to practical computing.
I am interested in the historical development of our understanding of astronomy and astrophysics. I am especially interested in development of stellar evolution, especially observations of historical Galactic supernovae.
I am a cultural historian with research interests in gender, science, and power. Currently, I am working on developing a novel hybrid historiography, combining network science, narrative analysis methods and approaches, and aspects of deconstructionism, seeking to test a model that might better mitigate against the camouflaging of women’s and other under-represented minorities contributions to science, in both historic and contemporary scientific discourses. I am also interested in the intersection of science, decision-making, and subjectivity, particularly with regards to science and technology during wartime, or as an aspect of nationalist discourses. I also work on the contemporary culture of science, specifically with regards to the representation of women and other under-represented minorities.
Atheism and the relationship between religion and science.
I have wide interests in the history of science and technology, especially in mathematics and computing. I have found much historical scientific material in NZ, especially for Charles Babbage and Charles Darwin. I have reviewed very many books and papers on history of science and technology, with some of those reviews detailing significant errors in the publication.
I have a particular interest in the social history of medicine. Although my work is in the field of health-related/social science research, I find the social history of medicine frequently intersects with the present-day projects with which I am involved. I am currently collaborating as a co-author on a journal article regarding surgical gloves – involving the history and the global changes in purpose, meaning and use of surgical gloves over the past century or so. Another area of interest is the development of children’s hospitals in New Zealand since 1840.
I am a philosopher with broad interests in metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and the mind. I teach courses on critical thinking (with a particular focus on the science/pseudoscience distinction), on the philosophy of science, and on the philosophy of technology. One of my areas of research concerns the philosophical issues and problems thrown up by de-extinction technology.
Rosie’s current research concerns the intersections of visual representation and environmental change in the long nineteenth century, and she has recently published on the entanglements of visual and material culture and de-extinction. She is particularly interested in the limits and potential distortions of images and other forms of visual representation, and the implications of these within scientific discourses. Rosie also has a long-standing research interest in the transnational Arts and Crafts Movement.
Our changing understanding of nature affects both our sense of self and our conception of what it is to lead good human lives. Alongside an ongoing fascination with this topic, I have research interests in the history of emotions and Early Modern animal studies.
I have longstanding interests in forestry, currently focussing on the spread of forestry practices through the British Empire as well as the meat industry in NZ and on the establishment of geography as a university discipline in NZ.
I am a current PhD candidate investigating the development of military pharmacy practice and profession, and the supply of medicines to the ANZAC forces during WWI. My research interests include the history of health commodities (medicines in particular) during times of adversity, locating pharmaceutical products within a wider context of emergency medicine. I am also interested in the intersections between the philosophies of the dedicated health professional (health and wellbeing), and the military structure and purpose (state-sanctioned violence), charting the change over time of the development of the profession. Vaccination, the antivaccination movement, and the right of refusal by captive populations are also part of my research area.
Dr Donald Kerr has been Special Collections Librarian at the University of Otago, Dunedin. In between writing books on the formation of private libraries, he has curated exhibitions and organised the Printer in Residence Programme at the University of Otago. He is currently working on a book about twelve prominent New Zealand book collectors.
Angela has published widely on migration, including ‘madness’ and migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is currently developing research on health issues for migrants.
My primary research interests are in evolution and population genetics, but I am also interested in the history of these subjects and how they have impacted society. I have worked for many years with the eugenic historian, Diane Paul. Together we have published on the history of eugenics as well as the laws and attitudes surrounding cousin marriage.
I am particularly interested in New Zealand environmental history during the period 1850-1920 - especially South Island attitudes to the indigenous environment and to exotic introductions, and early examples of conservation and of acclimatisation. More generally, I seek to compare evidence on these topics with a wider field of information relating to North Island, Australia and other overseas countries, and to a wider time frame (up to the present). Insofar as environmental transformation increasingly relied upon the application of western science and technology, and was increasingly understood through the lens of ecology, the history of science in New Zealand is an intrinsic component of my area of study.
In 2015 Rebecca Priestley and I convened a conference at VUW on the history of New Zealand science. A selection of 19th century papers from this conference has just been published in the latest issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, which is freely available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/tnzr20/47/1?nav=tocList
I have a broad interest in New Zealand and Antarctic science history, with a focus on the second half of the twentieth century. My interest in nuclear history spans the early use of radiation technologies in New Zealand to national responses to the Fukushima disaster in Japan. As a link with my science communication practice, I am also interested in the history of science communication in New Zealand.
Alistair studies scientific practice including the practices of science education. He writes in ways that treat instruments, tools, specimens, buildings, furniture, students and technicians as principal protagonists, and treats material, visual and spatial evidence as primary sources. He uses critical replication as both a research method and a pedagogy, so has learnt how to do things like construct astrolabes, make iron gall ink, write in old scripts, bind books. Alistair holds International Scholar status in the Society for History of Technology and is keen to connect New Zealand researchers with historians of technology elsewhere, via SHoT.
My research focuses on the way nurses trained and worked in hospitals, and created new ways of nursing in the marginal settings of backblocks, slums and war. I am also particularly interested in the meaning of 'dirt' and how notions of dirt have shaped public health policy, medical and nursing practice, and the idea of a civilised society. My research also examines historical lay health beliefs and practices, captured especially in home nursing texts and domestic health guides, and the blurred lay-professional boundaries of knowledge and care for the sick.
I am an environmental historian, and I am the current editor of e-journal Environment and Nature in New Zealand (ENNZ). My main areas of research interest relative to the history of science are agricultural science in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and more particularly agricultural chemistry and economic botany. In 2014, Canterbury University Press published my history of the Akaroa cocksfoot grass seed industry. I am also interested in nineteenth century New Zealand cartography and resource exploration. Prior to starting my PhD in History, I completed a BSc(Hons) in Chemistry.