Current visiting scholars

Read about our resident scholars’ previous achievements as well as their current projects with the Centre.

Graeme Aitken

Author/Researcher

Graeme Aitken has worked extensively in and around issues relating to Māori and their land and other Treaty rights. His roles have included:

working for the Office of Treaty Settlements when it was first established in the early-/mid-1990s
setting up Māori Focus Units in prisons in the mid/late 1990s
advising Moriori and other Treaty claimants in the early 2000s
assisting Te Puni Kōkiri with reviews of Te Ture Whenau Māori Act, the Māori Community Development Act, and other matters; involvement in reviews relating to legislative frameworks for kōhanga reo, Māori in local government in more recent times
stints at the Office of Treaty Settlements in 2007 and 2018.

Graeme also spent two years in Melbourne in the mid-2000s as the Manager and Lead Negotiator for the State of Victoria, responsible for progressing native title claims. Graeme enrolled in the Victoria’s Institute of Modern Letters writing programme in 2022 and graduated with a Master’s Degree (with merit) in early 2023. He is now writing a memoir about his life as a Pākeha in and around te ao Māori, aiming to provide insights into our history and into the evolution of Aotearoa/New Zealand towards a Treaty-based multi-cultural society. He expects to complete a first draft by mid-2024.

Nicola Saker

Nicola gained her M.A. at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Katherine Mansfield has been the focus for much of Nicola’s research including her thesis “The Performative Katherine Mansfield”. Most recently, in she edited the books “Woman in Love: The Love Letters of Katherine Mansfield” (2021) and “The Katherine Mansfield Cookbook” (2018). She has presented papers to Katherine Mansfield Society conferences: “Behind the Mask”, (Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka (2014), “Bookends: The beginning and end of Mansfield’s Life”, Sorbonne Nouvelle (2014) and “A Performer in the pure air of Bloomsbury” Newberry Library (2015). Food and food history is another area of Nicola’s research.

In 2011, she presented a paper “By Their Menus Ye Shall Know Them” to the N.Z. Food History Symposium which was subsequently published in The Aristologist, the Antipodean Journal of Food History. In 2018 she presented a paper “Beyond the Garden Party: The Katherine Mansfield Cookbook” at the 2019 symposium.

In 2022, “North and South” magazine published her article “The Forever Files” which detailed the state surveillance of her father and many of his friends in the 1940s and 1950s, two of whom were made to resign from their diplomatic careers in what was then the Department of External Affairs, now MFAT. The research involved in “The Forever Files” developed an interest in General Freyberg’s intelligence unit in WW2 as one of the men who resigned, Doug Lake, was part of the corps. General Freyberg, who trained as a dentist and didn’t cultivate an intellectual dimension, surrounded himself with men of exceptionally high intellectual capacity both in his intelligence unit and his wider group: Dan Davin, Paddy Costello, Geoffrey Cox, John White and Doug Lake to name some of them. These men have been written about in an atomised way, as part of a larger theme such as in “Dance of the Peacocks” (James McNeish), or in biographies of them as individuals, or in works regarding General Freyberg himself. The project would initially seek to analyse the diversity represented within the group and the military leadership that engendered its cohesion and supported that diversity. Other themes could well emerge during the process. Nicola joins the Stout in March.

Violet Blue

Author and journalist

Violet Blue is a six-time Independent Publisher Book Award ("IPPY") winning investigative journalist on cybersecurity, Covid-19, privacy, and human rights, having bylined for outlets including O The Oprah Magazine, Engadget, Financial Times, CNN, CBS News, San Francisco Chronicle, Popular Science, Yahoo News, and many others. Ms. Blue's books have sold over 2.2 million copies and have been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. Her most notable book appearance was on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Ms Blue’s most notable charity contribution was the donation of over 200,000 sales of The Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy to Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, the International Rescue Committee, and the American Civil Liberties Union, raising £3.7m for migrant charities. Guardian UK called Ms. Blue, "One of the leading figures in tech writing in the world."

Her new book A Fish Has No Word For Water won 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards GOLD and has been selected as National Indie Book Awards 2023 Finalist. KIRKUS called it “Gripping.” BookLife/Publisher's Weekly describes it as a “Superb memoir” with "Sharp dialogue, incisive observations, and polished prose." Blue's book on personal digital privacy and security, The Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy, was praised by ELLE Magazine as, “An illuminating handbook for women.” Ingram Collection Development Librarian Becky Walton wrote, “Highly recommended for public and school libraries, as well as social science and technology classes.” Violet has presented two Google Tech Talks, she is a crisis counselor, a harm reduction educator and a media crisis NGO trainer. Ms. Blue's father was a nuclear engineer and mother was a defense engineer for the US government. Blue is the only surviving member of her family and grew up homeless on the streets of San Francisco.

Violet has joined the Stout Research Centre as a long-term visiting scholar position to undertake research on her next book.

Dr Doug Munro

BA Flinders University, PhD Macquarie University, FRHistS

Doug was an Associate of the Stout Centre in the early 2000s. He has returned to the Centre to work on a project titled ‘Home Front Casualties: war-related suicides in World War II New Zealand. This is in association with John C. Weaver of MacMaster University, who himself has been affiliated with the Stout Centre. Doug’s initial research focused on the nineteenth-century Pacific Islands, and especially on indentured labour and plantation systems. During this time he lectured at universities in Queensland and at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, where he was Associate Professor and Head of History/Politics. Since the late 1990s Doug has switched to biographical writing on historians, the politics of senior academic appointments, and the Australian history wars. Between 2005 and 2012 he combined this research with the history of suicide in 20th century New Zealand, in association with John Weaver.

More recently Doug has written on the ‘new’ Australian universities of the 1960s, as well as papers on historians of Indo-Fijian indenture, including his close friend Brij V. Lal (1952–2021). A follow-up paper on this theme (titled ‘The Colonial Oversight of Historical Research: a case study from 1950s Fiji’) will also be written at the Stout Centre.

Selwyn Katene

Selwyn is currently undertaking research on the leadership experiences of a number of national religious leaders in New Zealand. Interviews are being conducted with church leaders from the Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, Salvation Army, Seventh Day Adventist, Mormon, Ratana, Ringatu and Destiny churches.

Rita Ricketts

The Diaries of Desmond (Paddy) Costello 1944-64

Deciphering and examining the diaries, now in my possession, is the focus of my current work. The Costello diaries start where Dan Davin’s accounts finish (see From Cairo to Monte Cassino, 2019) and end just before his premature death in 1964. While the diary entries do nothing to suggest that he could ever have been a spy, they adumbrate the many facets of his life and career: soldier, diplomat, academic, linguist and writer. And his observations continue to resonate today in many ways. First, the continued inability of New Zealand to develop, and maintain, an independent foreign policy. Secondly, the relentless, and often ill-informed interference from so-called close allies, the UK and the US (see Secret History, Hill and Loveridge 2023, and, for example, the facile IRD reports emanating from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office) in relation to defence and relations with other non-Western powers, notably China and Russia.

The material raises other questions. Why did NZ take so long to locate and position itself in its own hinterland? Why did the exceptionally talented Costello not want to return to New Zealand? He was just one of a cast of lost boys, Dan Davin, John Mulgan, Geoffrey Cox, Ian Milner; James Bertram, after many adventures in China (see Crisis in China 1937 and North China Front 1939), returned to New Zealand as an academic, although his continued association with communist-leaning organisations placed him under a cloud; as indeed were many subsequent ‘left-wing’ academics (see, for example, IRD, FCO 168/6395, 1972*).

The detailed transcription of the diaries is supported by research completed in NZ (ATL records and Archive NZ), and in the UK (MI5 and NZSIS records*). Further detailed scrutiny of the diaries, and eventual publication, while revealing Costello’s version of events, should provide insights into NZ’s continued attempts to develop an independent New Zealand foreign policy and its relationship to NZ’s social and cultural history in the inter-war period; the diary and adjunct papers released by the family shine a light on prejudice against the Irish and Roman Catholics for instance. Material seen in the archives of Oxford University Press details some of his literary work, an area of his life, albeit too truncated, has been neglected. A transcription of a selection of these papers is in progress.

Federica Pieristè

In February 2025, Federica will be joining the Stout for a few months to continue her research, as a PhD candidate from the Sapienza Università di Roma, PhD Course in History, Anthropology, Religions, and her association with the Te Puna Vai Mārama Cook Islands Centre for Research.

Provisional title: “Gastro-decolonising Oceania. Transnational trajectories and the localisation of food sovereignty across the Cook Islands and Aotearoa-New Zealand”. This research investigates the historical dimensions and contemporary impacts of colonization on food practices in the Cook Islands, utilizing the concept of "gastro-colonialism", understood as the extensive range of ongoing colonial and neo/colonial dietary impositions on indigenous food systems, that frame subjectivities and bodily experiences of the people of Oceania.

By conducting a combination of historical analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews with local communities and food activists in Rarotonga, the aim of this research is to understand how these pervasive, yet underhand policies shape local dietary habits and affect health outcomes, and to investigate how indigenous responses are reclaiming and transforming food systems through movements for food sovereignty, sustainability, self-determination, and cultural revitalization. Given the ongoing flow of people, goods, and ideas between the Cook Islands and Aotearoa-New Zealand, the study aims to adopt a transnational perspective, to understand the connections between the food practices and discourses of native Cook Islanders and the growing gastro-decolonization initiatives arising among New Zealand Māori, to assess the actual directions and dynamism of Oceanian contemporary responses to colonial legacies in food systems. Federica has now returned to the Cook Islands.

Anna Castelli

Anna Castelli’s research examines contested heritage, focusing on how contemporary art practices engage with issues of restitution, return, and repatriation within the frameworks of decolonization and indigenization. In recent years, artists globally have increasingly confronted complex historical narratives, using their work to reinterpret and challenge debates surrounding contested heritage. This engagement occurs within the framework of museums that are undergoing significant transformation, striving to become post-ethnographic institutions—places that move beyond colonial, ethnocentric narratives and practices. Castelli’s research investigates a range of artistic approaches, analyzing how artists navigate tensions between museum practices, cultural identity, the role of conservation science.

Through the visual analysis of key artworks, Castelli’s study delves into the motivations, methodologies, and impacts of these practices on the communities involved. The research aims to uncover the ways in which artists engage with the politics of memory, ownership, and historical narratives, and how their work contributes to ongoing conversations about cultural restitution and social justice. By comparing case studies from diverse cultural contexts and historical periods, the research seeks to identify recurring themes, strategies, and aesthetic interventions employed by artists to confront and challenge contested heritage. This comparative analysis will highlight the transformative potential of art in confronting difficult histories and fostering cross-cultural dialogues, ultimately shedding light on how art can contribute to the repatriation process and the healing of historical wounds.

Anna is a researcher specializing in art and anthropology within global art history. She is a PhD candidate in Visual and Media Studies at IULM University, Milan, and holds a Master's in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, London. Castelli is the author and editor of several publications, including Scambiarsi le arti and L'infanzia del segno. Her writing has appeared in journals and edited volumes, exploring topics such as museum ethics, human remains, and comparative studies in contemporary art.

Her research in Aotearoa New Zealand is granted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (13th edition, 2024), which aims to promote Italian contemporary art worldwide.

Anna is with the Stout Research Centre from February to April 2025.

Mikko Myllyntausta

Mikko received his PhD in history from the University of Turku in 2022. His PhD thesis entitled Proving Grounds: The Formation and Use of Competing Claims to Knowledge about New Zealand Māori in the 1830s British Debates on Colonisation examines the movement of knowledge between New Zealand and Britain before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. His broader research interests lie in the history of knowledge, with a particular focus on the dissemination of colonial knowledge related to the Pacific region. He is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher examining transimperial connections of Finnish popular education in the project “Transimperial mobilities in the Grand Duchy of Finland, c. 1860-1918”. He is also an editor and author in the book Tiedonhistoria (2023), which is the first contribution in Finnish to the development of the budding field of the history of knowledge.

In the beginning of 2026, Mikko will start a new project “Weaving Webs across the World: Networks of Knowledge from the Pacific to Finland and Germany in the Long 19th Century”. This research investigates the formation and functioning of global networks of knowledge during the long 19^th century by examining various connections between two geographically distant regions that were relatively marginal to each other: the Pacific region, including New Zealand, and Finland and Germany.

The project explores how global networks of knowledge connected these distant regions together, how they facilitated the dissemination of knowledge across the globe through the agency of diverse actors, and what impact the networks had on the kinds of knowledge that were available about the Pacific region and its people on the other side of the world. During his visit to the Stout Research Centre, Mikko will prepare the beginning of the upcoming project and undertake initial archival work for the project.

Mikko will be at the Stout Research Centre during May and June 2025.

Rebecca Macfie

Rebecca is an author, journalist, and researcher. Her research focus is on the capacity of grassroots and community organisations to disrupt the harms of poverty by bringing a whānau-centred and strengths-based approach to bear on the systemic drivers of deprivation (including housing, precarious work, racism and intergenerational trauma). As the JD Stout Fellow in 2024, her research continues to expand on an existing body of work, published in The Listener as a series titled ‘Hardship & Hope’, which shines a light on the skill and innovation in local communities determined to remove the structural barriers to wellbeing for their tamariki.

A growing body of scientific research points to the lifelong harm caused by childhood deprivation. Increasingly, the evidence also points to the need for locally-led, place-based initiatives which, provided adequate long-term funding and the flexibility to build trusting relationships, can enable families suffering persistent disadvantage to build on their strengths and thrive. Rebecca brings these two threads of research together by telling the stories of local community activism and commitment to a decent future for children and families.

Based in Christchurch, Rebecca will also be involved in the 2026 Conference organisation to be hosted by the Stout Research Centre, following on from the successful 2024 conference on Pakukore: Poverty, by Design.

Dr Emma-Jean Kelly

Emma is joining the Stout for the next few months from August. She is currently working with Dr Oliver Sutherland and Ulla Sköld on a memoir about their lives and work. She wants to answer the question—how do a Pākehā entomologist and a Swedish woman trained in sociology, education and statistics become social justice activists embedded in many of the most important movements to challenge institutional racism over the last 50 years in Aotearoa New Zealand?

Dr Emma-Jean Kelly is an oral historian who has worked at Manatū Taonga, Ministry for Culture and Heritage for the last six years. She is a proud Irish diaspora New Zealander, and has a particular interest in feminist labour history and bicultural and indigenous practices. She has produced two large-scale podcasts. Te Rauparaha Kei Wareware (2023) won the Gold Award of the New York Festivals Radio Awards, as well as being finalist for a Silver award at the NZ Radio & Podcast Awards. Kei Roto I Te Miru: Inside the Bubble was a community oral history project about the 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Alina Berg

Alina Berg will be joining the Stout from October until the middle of 2026 to undertake research on Pounamu. She is working with closely with the Museum and Heritage Studies programme. Alina is from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich).

Her research topic: Towards a natural-cultural approach to decolonial museum scholarship: Building a digital archive of pounamu’s living relations.

This thesis explores and activates the entanglements of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in museum spaces and beyond by studying pounamu—jade/greenstone from Aotearoa New Zealand—a stone and material that has been deeply engrained in Māori cosmo-ontology, while also being subjected to geological inquiry and (colonial) collecting and trade for centuries.

Setting out by tracing pounamu at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, the British Museum, the Museum Fünf Kontinente Munich and the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, it seeks to digitally assemble a kaleidoscope of stories situating pounamu in its net of living relations and reactivating its taonga-ness. This thesis seeks to unravel the stories that pounamu ‘things’ can tell us today, by reading them as archives of combined natural-cultural knowledge throughout a form of provenance research that integrates geological and Māori methodologies, recentring frequently overlooked actors in the context of museum scholarship and reconnecting ‘exiled’ pounamu with its (hi)stories of origin.

Pounamu comes alive in Māori stories and cosmological narratives that transcend and unite notions of temporality and environment, whereas geologists study pounamu formations and sediments to uncover the Earth’s tectonic history and long-term environmental changes. These comprehensive notions of time and space are captured through storytelling and enactive fieldwork, as reflected in in-situ observation and monitoring, collection and preservation practices in Aotearoa New Zealand, placing the pounamu within its living ecology. Insights and assembled stories will feed back into collecting institutions and be made digitally accessible as part of a collaborative digital archive for Māori source communities.

Margaret Nell Galt

Margaret is an independent researcher who has recently retired from the New Zealand Treasury. Her research focus is examining the development of New Zealand settler society and economy using a dataset that traces 19^th-century New Zealand settler men with surnames Ryan or beginning with RA (e.g., Rabone, Rafferty) across their lifetimes and across generations. So far, she has produced three articles using this database that cover:

Migration patterns: Looking at pathways of migration both to and from New Zealand, published as: Following through: The value of tracing British Settlers across time and space, Journal of New Zealand Studies, (2023) NS36 pp.105-123
Migrant outcomes: Assessing the impact on life outcomes using lifespan, wealth at death and occupational status of men who migrated to New Zealand compared to their brothers who remained in Britain, published as: The Impact of Migrant Selection and Destination on the Wellbeing Outcomes of British Migrants to Nineteenth-Century New Zealand, Journal of Migration Studies (2025) 11, pp 291-321
The impact of World War 1: Examining the family background and life impacts of service in World War 1, published as: Interrupted Trajectories: Was World War One a Watershed or Interlude in Soldiers Lives? New Zealand Journal of History (2025) 59(1) pp.24-49.

Margaret is joining the Stout in 2026 and will be investigating the impact of parental deaths on family outcomes, both for the surviving spouse and for their children as a window into the role of fathers and mothers in family wellbeing. Subsequently, she plans to examine different aspects of lifetime and intergenerational social and economic mobility.