Josh King

Josh is researching the experience of New Zealanders in the Mediterranean during the Second World War.

Qualifications

PhD in History, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2023

MA in History, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2018

BA(Hons) in History, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2017

LLB, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2016

Profile

Josh is a PhD student in History at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. He moved to Wellington in 2012 to start his undergraduate study, and has been a student at Vic ever since. Josh’s research interests largely centre on the social and cultural history of war. His main research focus is New Zealand’s involvement in the Second World War, but he has also worked on the First World War and the nineteenth century British Army.

Josh’s thesis explores New Zealanders’ experience of the Mediterranean during the Second World War. He investigates how New Zealanders, often overseas for the first time in their lives, interacted with the places they visited and the people they met in the Middle East, Greece and Italy from 1940-1946. Acknowledging that a minority of New Zealanders who served in the Mediterranean spent a minority of their time fighting, Josh moves beyond the traditional combat focus that has dominated New Zealand history of the Second World War. In doing so, he discusses overseas war service as a more complex and wide-ranging experience, that took New Zealanders to places that were geographically, culturally and linguistically different from anything they would have encountered at home.

Supervisors

Publications

‘“The country Christ knew”: New Zealanders’ Interactions with Christianity in the Middle East, Greece and Italy during the Second World War’, Journal of Religious History, 2022 (Expected).

‘Turfing Latin part of a disturbing pattern’, Newsroom, 24 February 2021: available at https://www.newsroom.co.nz/ideasroom/turfing-latin-part-of-a-disturbing-pattern.

‘“Certainly Getting About the World”: New Zealanders’ Experience of the Middle East as a Place during the Second World War’, Journal of New Zealand Studies, No. NS30, 2020, pp. 116-139.

‘From Scum of the Earth to Soldiers of the Queen: The Reputation of Working Class British Soldiers in the Nineteenth Century’, Strife: The Academic Journal of the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London, Issue 14, Winter 2020, pp. 68-79.

‘WW100 was great at raising WWI awareness. Understanding? Not so much’, The Spinoff, 14 May 2019; available at https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/14-05-2019/ww100-was-great-at-raising-wwi-awareness-understanding-not-so-much.