Mark Williams appointed to Emeritus Professor
Professor Williams has been a member of the Victoria University of Wellington community for 13 years, beginning as a visiting scholar at the Stout Research Centre in 2006, and continuing as a teacher in the English Programme where he became Associate Professor in 2009 and was promoted to Professor in 2011.
Professor Williams undertook his MA at Auckland University in the mid-1970s before travelling to Vancouver where he completing his PhD at the University of British Columbia in 1983. When he returned to New Zealand he spent a number of years on temporary lectureships before gaining a tenured position at Canterbury University in 1992, during which time he spent several months as a visiting professor at Tokyo University teaching New Zealand literature.
Professor Williams is recognised nationally and internationally as one of the preeminent scholars of New Zealand and postcolonial literature. He has published widely in both fields since the mid-1980s and is on the editorial boards of a number of scholarly journals. Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Professor Sarah Leggott says, “It is not an over-statement to say that his work has shaped the field of the literary history of Aotearoa.”
His critical study Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1672-1914 (co-authored with Jane Stafford) is a seminal work, and more recently Professor Williams has been published by both Oxford University Press—vol 9 of ‘The Oxford History of the Novel in English’—and Cambridge University Press—A History of New Zealand Literature.
In his last few years at the University, Professor Williams has travelled to China, where he is an Honorary Professor at Jinan University’s School of Translation Studies in Zhuhai.
“To become an Emeritus Professor at Victoria University of Wellington is indeed a great honour. I am deeply conscious of the value of continuing my association with such a distinguished University and with its brilliant, lively, wonderfully productive English Programme,” says Professor Williams.
Professor Williams is currently writing a novel on the notion of the earthly paradise based on his childhood experience of the Christadelphian religion.