Bios

Professor Yifen Beus received her PhD in comparative literature from Indiana University and currently teaches Film Studies at Brigham Young University Hawai‘i. Her teaching and research interests include modernity, reflexivity, intertextuality, minor (trans)nationalism and de-westernising story-telling in cinema (Sinophone and Francophone). She is the author of Towards a Paradoxical Theatre: Schlegelian Irony in German and French (2003), her work has appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, and Journal of African Cultural Studies, and she has contributed, among other publications, to Storytelling in World Cinemas (2013), De-Westernizing Film Studies (2012), and New Zealand, France and the Pacific (2011).

Tom Brooking is Professor of History at the University of Otago. He specialises in New Zealand agricultural, rural and environmental history as well as political history, the history of ideas and the Scottish New Zealand connection. He is the author of The History of New Zealand (2004), and co-editor of Seeds of Empire: The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand (2010), The Heather and the Fern: Scottish Migration and New Zealand Settlement (2003), and Environmental Histories of New Zealand (2002). He has also written two biographies of leading Scots - And Captain of Their Souls: An Interpretative Essay on the Life and Times of Captain William Cargill (1984), and Lands for the People? The Highland Clearances and the Colonisation of New Zealand. A Biography of John McKenzie (1996). He is currently completing a biography of New Zealand’s longest serving Prime Minister, Richard John Seddon.

Rainer F. Buschmann is professor and founding faculty member in the history programme at the California State University Channel Islands. He has formerly taught at Hawaii Pacific University and Purdue University. While a graduate student at the University of Hawaii, he developed a keen interest in the European expansion into the Pacific Ocean. His research has resulted in four books: Oceans in World History (2007), Anthropology’s Global Histories: The Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea, 1870-1935 (2009), Iberian Visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507-1899 (2014), and (with Ed Slack and Jim Tueller) Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521-1898 (2014). He is currently writing about the much-neglected role of Portugal in the Pacific and has taken on the editorship (with Katrina Gulliver) of a new series entitled Pacific Worlds issued by University of Nebraska Press.

David Callahan, a New Zealander, is Associate Professor of English at the University of Aveiro, Portugal. His book Rainforest Narratives: The Work of Janette Turner Hospital (2009), was a co-winner of Australia’s McRae Russell Award for the best book of literary scholarship on an Australian subject. His articles on postcolonial issues have appeared in journals such as Interventions, Postcolonial Studies, Literature & History, Critique, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of New Zealand Literature and New Zealand Journal of Media Studies, along with book chapters on subjects such as New Zealand film, South African film, Australian film, and CSI. Current research focuses on the processing of the history of East Timor across a range of discourses.

Ian Conrich is Associate Professor in the School of Communication, International Studies and Languages, at the University of South Australia, where he has also held the position Associate Head of School: Research. Previously, he was Professor of Film and Visual Culture at the University of Derby and the founding Director of the Centre for New Zealand Studies, Birkbeck, University of London. He was the 2005 MacGeorge Visiting Scholar at the University of Melbourne, and 2005-6 was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Oxford, in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. He is Principal Editor of the Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies, an Editor of the Journal of British Cinema and Television, Associate Editor of Film and Philosophy, and an advisory board member of Interactive Media, and Studies in Australasian Cinema. He has been a Guest Editor of the Harvard Review, Post Script, Asian Cinema, and Studies in Travel Writing. The author of Studies in New Zealand Cinema (2009), Easter Island, Myths, and Popular Culture (2011), and New Zealand Cinema (2015), and co-author of The Cinema of Sri Lanka: South Asian Film in Texts and Contexts (2016) and Gothic Dissections in Film and Literature: The Body in Parts (2016), he is an author, editor or co-editor of a further thirteen books, including New Zealand Filmmakers (2007), Contemporary New Zealand Cinema (2008), The Cinema of New Zealand (in Polish, 2009), New Zealand, France and the Pacific (2011), and Easter Island: Cultural and Historical Perspectives (2015). He has contributed to more than 50 books and journals, and his work has been translated into French, German, Danish, Polish, Hungarian, and Hebrew.

Dr Paola Della Valle teaches at the University of Turin, Italy. She specializes in New Zealand literature. Her articles have appeared in English Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, NZSA Bulletin of New Zealand Studies, and Il Castello di Elsinore and Quaderni del ‘900. She is the author of From Silence to Voice: The Rise of Maori Literature (2010) and Stevenson nel Pacifico: una lettura postcoloniale (2013). She has also contributed to the volume Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (2011).

Marc Delrez (MA Adelaide; PhD Liège) is Professor of Literature in English (new and established) as well as of comparative literature at the University of Liège, Belgium. After a longstanding presence on the executive boards of ACLALS (Association for Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies) and EACLALS (the European branch of that same organisation), he is currently Chair of EASA, the European Association for Studies on Australia. His most recent editorial endeavour was the publication, in collaboration with Gordon Collier, Anne Fuchs, and Bénédicte Ledent, of a two-volume collection of essays in honour of Geoffrey V. Davis, entitled Engaging with Literature of Commitment (2012). His publications further include articles on Salman Rushdie, Randolph Stow, David Malouf, Nicholas Jose, Richard Flanagan, Andrew McGahan, Robert Drewe, Peter Carey, and Janet Frame. His monograph on Janet Frame, Manifold Utopia, appeared in Rodopi’s Cross/Cultures series in 2002. He is currently writing a book on Janet Frame for the series ‘New Zealand Writers’, published by Kakapo Books.

Dr Oliver Haag teaches in European Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are in the areas of European reception of Indigenous New Zealand and Australian literatures, the history of publishing and critical race and whiteness theory. Oliver has published in English- and German-speaking journals, including Aboriginal History, National Identities and Continuum. He is co-editor of a book on ego-histoire and Indigenous Australian Studies, Ngapartji Ngapartji: Reciprocal Engagement (2014), and is co-editor of the Australian Studies Journal (Zeitschrift für Australienstudien).Oliver is currently engaged in research on idealised Indigeneity in German imperial discourses (1850s-1945).

Sei Kosugi is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Language and Culture, Osaka University, Japan. She gained her MA in English Literature at Kobe College, and Te Hiranga Māori (Certificate in Maori Studies) at the University of Waikato. Her research interests are postcolonial literature, indigenous and immigrant literature/ theatre in Oceania, indigenous language education, and the history of medicine. She started her research career by studying the British modernist writer, Virginia Woolf, and the New Zealand writer, Janet Frame. She is the author of He Maramataka Hapanihi (2012). She has also contributed to collections including Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place (2007) and Performing Identities: Celebrating Indigeneity in the Arts (2015). She has published articles on Maori, Samoan, Tahitian, Fijian, Vanuatu, PNG, and Australian literature.

Dr Rognvald (Ron) Leask, a New Zealander, is a maître de conférences at the University of Strasbourg, where he is responsible for the Applied Foreign Languages (LEA) Bachelor’s Degree by distance learning. He is a member of the research laboratory EA2325 SEARCH (Savoirs dans l’Espace Anglophone: Représentations, Culture, Histoire). His doctoral thesis was on the interpretation by European observers of the democratic reforms put in place in New Zealand at the end of the nineteenth-century. He is currently following two lines of research, which intersect frequently. The first involves following and analysing the evolution of bi- and multicultural relations in New Zealand. The second line of research examines the role of the Commonwealth of Nations in supporting its smaller, weaker democracies and the choice of mechanisms that it makes to achieve this end.

Dr Brian McDonnell is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Massey University’s Auckland campus. His PhD from the University of Auckland was on the subject of the relationship between New Zealand Fiction and film. He has published three books on film, including authoring Fresh Approaches to Film (1998), and co-authoring the Encyclopedia of Film Noir (2007), as well as a large number of book chapters and journal articles on New Zealand cinema and Hollywood cinema, and other facets of media. He is also consultant for the series of books, New Zealand Film Classics, forthcoming from Kakapo Books. He worked for seven years on the New Zealand Film and Literature Board of Review and was a Fulbright visiting lecturer at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. in 2008. He is of Irish and Maori (Tuhoe iwi) descent.

Dr Michaela Moura-Koçoğlu teaches Women’s Studies and Postcolonial English Literatures at Florida International University in Miami. She is the author of Narrating Indigenous Modernities: Transcultural Dimensions in Contemporary Maori Literature (2011). Among her primary research interests are Indigenous Women’s Studies, Anglophone and Lusophone African Women Writers, and Transculturality as a critical methodology. She has also published on literature from Oceania, postcolonial studies and multicultural children’s fiction. Michaela is a series consultant for the ‘New Zealand Writers’ publications, forthcoming from Kakapo Books.

Susan Y. Najita is an associate professor at the University of Michigan where she holds a dual appointment in the Department of English Languages and Literatures and the Program in Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies in the Department of American Culture.  She has written about the works of Albert Wendt, Keri Hulme, Patricia Grace, and Jane Campion as well as writers from other parts of the Pacific including Gary Pak, John Dominis Holt, Joseph N. Poepoe, and Nathaniel B. Emerson. Her first book, Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Literature (Routledge, 2006) examined how such contemporary writers are engaging the history of contact and colonisation in the period of re-emerging nationalism and postcolonial reconciliation.  Her current project engages with the relationship between texts of oral tradition and the history of public lands in Hawai‘i.

Dr David Newman teaches at RMIT University Vietnam. He earned his PhD in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, with a dissertation exploring government screen policy in New Zealand, Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements during the 1920s and 1930s. His current research interests span screen policy, New Zealand film industry history, creative industries, creative entrepreneurship and the creative process. He has contributed to Silencing Cinema: Film Censorship Around the World (2013), Small Nations, Big Neighbours: New Zealand and Canada (2011), The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry (2008), and Cross-Border Cultural Production: Economic Runaway or Globalisation? (2008), and is co-editing a book on screen policies internationally.

Dr Max Quanchi is a Senior Lecturer teaching Pacific Island History at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji. He has published mainly on Pacific History and the History of Photography. He has been guest editor for special issues on the history of photography for Pacific Studies (1997) and the Journal of Pacific History (2007) and since 1996 convened panels on photography at several Pacific History Association conferences. In 2007, his monograph Photographing Papua: Representation, Colonial Encounters and Imaging in the Public Domain focused on the colonial frontier in PNG. His most recent books are the co-authored The A to Z of the Discovery and Exploration of the Pacific Islands (2010), and the co-edited Hunters and Collectors: Pacific Collections in Australian Museums, Art Galleries and Archives (2010). He was co-author of A National Strategy for Pacific Studies (2009) and editor of a special issue on Australia and the Pacific for Social Alternatives (2010). A book on Pacific Island postcards from the colonial era is forthcoming. He is also currently working on colonial photography in New Caledonia and a book on the photographer, Thomas McMahon.

Eva Rueschmann is the Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty at Hampshire College (Amherst, MA), where she is also a professor of cultural studies. She teaches courses in world literature and cinema with a special focus on Australian and New Zealand film, exile and migration in transnational literature and film, gender studies, and film studies. She is also the Vice President of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies and serves on the New Zealand Studies Association steering Council. The author of two books, Sisters on Screen: Siblings in Contemporary Cinema (2000) and Moving Pictures, Migrating Identities (2003), Eva Rueschmann has also published several essays on such topics as female coming-of-age narratives in New Zealand cinema and the work of film directors Margarethe von Trotta and Jane Campion. Her current project is a book in the Kakapo Books series, ‘New Zealand Film Classics’, which focuses on Jane Campion’s film An Angel at My Table.

Dr Roy Smith is Programme Leader for the MA in International Development, School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University, UK. He has a particular research interest in small island states and has conducted fieldwork and written on islands ranging from Unst in the Shetland Islands to Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Palau and Tuvalu in the Pacific. He is a former visiting research fellow at the Australian National University, the Pacific Islands editor for the Sage publication Journal of Developing Societies and an area representative for the Pacific Islands Society of the United Kingdom and Ireland. He has also contributed to the co-funded European Union / University of the South Pacific Global Climate Change Alliance project. His publications include, as author, The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement After Mururoa (1997) and, as co-author, International Political Economy in the 21st Century: Contemporary issues and analyses, (2010). He has also published in Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies, Global Environmental Politics, Security Dialogue, International Journal of Ethics, Central European Journal of International and Security Studies, and International Journal of Climate Change.

Kirsten Moana Thompson is Professor and Director of Film Studies at Seattle University. Previously, she taught at Victoria University, Wellington, and Wayne State University in Detroit, USA. She has taught and published in regards to animation, colour studies, classical Hollywood New Zealand and Pacific cinema and has served on several editorial boards including the New Zealand Studies Council. Publications include, as author, Apocalyptic Dread: American Cinema at the Turn of the Millennium (2007), and Crime Films: Investigating the Scene (2007) and, as co-editor, Perspectives on German Film (1996), as well as numerous book chapters on animation and New Zealand cinema. She is currently at work on a new book on colour, visual culture and animation.

Dr Mandy Treagus is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, and film. She researches on Victorian, Australian and Pacific literature, film, and cultural history. Her book Empire Girls: The Colonial Heroine Comes of Age (2014), examines the female Bildungsroman in British colonies. Her current project, which explores the display of Pacific peoples in colonial exhibitions, especially with regard to the agency of performers, has appeared in several edited collections, including Oceania and the Victorian Imagination (2013).

Jackie Tuaupiki is a lecturer in Maori language and culture and PhD student in the School of Maori and Pacific Development at the University of Waikato. He has been involved in numerous canoe practices, ranging from outrigger canoeing, Maori ceremonial canoeing and sailing double hull ocean voyaging canoes in Aotearoa and the Pacific. He is a crewmember on the double hull voyaging canoes, Te Matau a Maui in Aotearoa and Makali’i in Hawai’i. His research has focused on canoe knowledge reclamation and the maintenance and retention of canoe practices in Aotearoa.

Professor Toon van Meijl studied social anthropology and philosophy at the University of Nijmegen and at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he completed his PhD in 1991. Since 1982 he has conducted thirty-three months of ethnographic fieldwork among the Tainui Maori in New Zealand. Currently, he is Professor of Anthropology and head of the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He is also director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Pacific and Asian Studies at Nijmegen, and Chair of the European Society for Oceanists. He has published widely on issues of cultural identity and the self, and on socio-political questions emerging from the debate about property rights of indigenous peoples.

Laura Sedgwick is currently studying for a PhD on the topic of ‘Haunted Spaces in Contemporary Horror Cinema: Set Designs and the Gothic’. She is Book Reviews Editor for the Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies, and Assistant Organiser for the annual conferences of the New Zealand Studies Association. She is also an associate curator for the Moai Culture online educational resource, which supports the international travelling exhibition, Easter Island, Myths and Popular Culture.

Jennifer Wagner earned her PhD in Applied Linguistics in the Research Centre for Languages & Cultures, at the University of South Australia. She previously taught French and linguistics at the University of South Australia as well as English as a Second Language in the United States and France. She has published two books for learners of French – Say it in French (2011) and Great French Stories of the Twentieth Century: A Dual-Language Book (2012) – and she has been the webmaster of ielanguages.com, a free language learning website, for over a decade. She is also the assistant editor of the Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies, an assistant organiser for the annual conferences of the New Zealand Studies Association, and an associate curator of the Easter Island, Myths and Popular Culture international exhibition.