JD Stout Annual Lectures

Watch the previous JD Stout Annual Lectures.

2023: Dr Michael Brown - Tracing digital footsteps: A New Zealand musician in the Internet age

Dr Michael Brown discusses his research into the potential and challenges of looking at New Zealand cultural history through the lens of the Internet. Since becoming widely accessible in the 1990s, the Internet has had a profound impact on creative fields such as music. For younger generations of New Zealand musicians, the Internet has opened the door to new musical discoveries, online communities, music-making tools, and global audiences. Some, such as self-described ‘internet kid’, Lorde, have risen to international superstardom, while others have found niches in more esoteric corners of the web.

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2022: Dr Ben Schrader—Fabricating identities: A short history of Historic Preservation in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1890-1990

Dr Ben Schrader discusses his research into historic preservation in Aotearoa using case studies to illustrate the ever-changing meanings of 'heritage'.

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2021: Nick Bollinger—Revolutions per minute: The rise and fall of the counterculture in New Zealand

In the 2021 J.D. Stout Lecture, Nick Bollinger presents his research on the rise of the counterculture in this country and some of the reasons for its fall.

'Counterculture' was a term coined in the 1960s to identify a global movement comprised of dropouts, hippies, radicals, revolutionaries, and other dissenters from the mainstream. Collectively it rejected many of society’s accepted norms, challenging attitudes to art, sex, education, environment, drugs, politics, and domestic life. Though the movement was global, New Zealand had its own version.

2020: Max Rashbrooke—A country of two halves?

In the 2020 J.D. Stout Annual Stout Lecture, writer and commentator Max Rashbrooke looks at 'A country of two halves'.

In supposedly egalitarian New Zealand, the wealthiest 10 percent own 60 percent of all the country's assets. Max Rashbrooke uses previously unreleased data and interviews with both wealthy and poor New Zealanders to illuminate the contours of a changing country and examines whether these trends herald the regrowth of class divisions in New Zealand and an increasingly segregated society.