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.

Graeme has been 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 sent his manuscript to a publisher in late 2025 and hopes to see progress towards publication during 2026.

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 Research Centre in March 2026.

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 Research 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 Research Centre.

Professor 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.

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.

Margaret 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 19th-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 Research Centre 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.

Norman Meehan

Norman Meehan’s research has largely focused on jazz and New Zealand music. His books include Time Will Tell: Conversations with Paul Bley (Berkeley Hills), New Zealand Jazz Life (VUP) and the biographies Serious Fun: The Life and Music of Mike Nock (VUP), and Jenny McLeod: A life in Music (THWVUP). Whilst visiting the Stout Centre, he will be working on the biography of New Zealander Paul Oestreicher. Oestreicher, an Anglican priest and Quaker, worked internationally as a peace and human rights activist during the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Germany and raised in Aotearoa as a refugee from the Nazi regime, his professional life in Europe included senior roles in Amnesty International, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Anglican Church. He was an early advocate for the ordination of women and, as Director of the Division of International Affairs for the British Council of Churches, worked extensively in communist Eastern Europe and in South Africa. Awarded an OBE for his service in 2022, Paul has retired to New Zealand, where he lives with his wife Barbara Einhorn.

Chris Lipscombe

For almost three decades, Chris has provided strategic planning and business support for companies entering the Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean markets.

  • He has formerly served as co-chair of the China and New Zealand Business Council, board member of the New Zealand China Trade Association, president of Wellington Xiamen Association, and national president of the New Zealand China Friendship Society.
  • Currently, he is a trustee of the New Zealand Chinese Language Week Trust, board member of the Pacific China Friendship Association, a committee member of The Printing Museum Te Whare Taonga Perehitanga, and president of the Wellington Branch of New Zealand China Friendship Society.

During his time at the Stout Research Centre, Chris is researching and writing a book on the life and work of New Zealand academic and China correspondent James (Jim) Bertram. He hopes to publish the book in English and Chinese.

In 1937, Jim interviewed Mao Zedong and other Chinese communist leaders in Yan'an and spent five months with the 120th Division of the Eighth Route Army under General He Long. In the previous year, he had been one of three western journalists reporting the capture of Chiang Kai-shek in Xi'an and the formation of the Second United Front to fight the invading Japanese forces. In 1941, following the capture of Hong Kong by the Japanese, Jim became a prisoner of war, first in Hong Kong and then in Tokyo.

On his return to New Zealand, Jim worked for CORSO promoting humanitarian aid for China. Appointed to a senior lectureship in English at Victoria University College Wellington in 1947, Jim taught English literature to undergraduate and honours students for the next thirty years until his retirement in 1975.  Jim's work as a correspondent in China has been overshadowed by contemporaries like Rewi Alley and Edgar Snow, yet he was part of and worked closely with other members of the same circle. Following the inclusion of two quotations from Jim's interviews with Mao Zedong in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (the famous 'little red book'), Jim may well be the most widely published New Zealand author of the 20th century. An evaluation of Jim's role in China affairs and in the literary history of New Zealand seems overdue.

Chris has a Bachelor of Arts (History) from the University of Canterbury, a Postgraduate Diploma in Business (Marketing) from the University of Auckland Business School, and a Master of International Relations (Distinction) from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington.

Renée Robbers

Renée Robbers is a PhD candidate at Maastricht University whose research bridges Planetary Health and environmental humanities. Her project investigates how knowledge—understood not as a static object but as a relational and situated process—emerges, moves, and transforms through encounters between humans, rivers, and other more-than-human actors within water-related practices. Rather than treating knowledge as a universal substance to be transferred or applied, her work explores knowing as something that unfolds within relationships: between bodies, places, histories, and ontologies.

During her stay at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies, Renée will undertake place-based fieldwork focused human–river relations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Combining multispecies, ethnographic and audiovisual methods, her research will engage with water monitoring practices, restoration initiatives, and conversations with people working with and alongside rivers and coastal ecosystems in order to explore how ecological knowledge takes shape through lived relationships with rivers and place.

Renée is joining the Stout in September through to 2027.

Yuka Mizutani

Yuka Mizutani specializes in Indigenous studies and cultural anthropology. For more than 20 years, she has focused on multiple issues, including Indigenous people’s experiences at the geographic margins of the U.S. territory, including Pacific islands; the revitalization of Indigenous cultures; the repatriation of items from museums; and the relationship between Indigenous people and academic institutions. In 2026-2027, she plans to participate in activities of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies as a visiting scholar to deepen her knowledge of issues related to Māori people, in order to extend the geographical scope of her research.

Yuka holds a Ph.D. in Area Studies (Sophia University, 2009) and is a professor at the Center for Global Education and Discovery and the Graduate Program of International Cooperation Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. Formerly, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies at Hokkaido University in Japan. Also, she was a Fulbright visiting scholar at the Museum Studies Graduate Certificate Program in the Department of American Studies of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2019-2020.

Yuka is joining the Stout in November 2026 through to 2027.

Dr Anna Talasniemi

I am a Finnish arts and culture professional currently pursuing doctoral research on contemporary Finnish sauna culture. My interdisciplinary work combines heritage research, aesthetics, arts-based methodologies, and futures studies. Alongside my research, I have extensive experience in the arts, culture, foundation, and cultural governance sectors, including nearly ten years as a foundation director and several board positions in arts organisations. I am also a co-founder of a community-based initiative working to establish a new inclusive public sauna in Helsinki.

Anna is from Jyväskylä University, Helsinki, Finland and will be visiting the Stout for a few weeks at the end of 2026.