Current visiting scholars

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

Ingjerd Hoem

Ingjerd Hoem is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway; she has been a former visiting scholar at the Stout Research Centre. Her work, since 1987, is on Tokelau, and covers a variety of issues, ranging from language to politics. Among her latest publications are: Languages of Governance in Conflict. Negotiating democracy in Tokelau. John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam (2015), State, labour and kin: tensions of value in an egalitarian community, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2018) and Theatre and Political Process: Staging Identities in Tokelau and New Zealand. Berghahn, Oxford, New York (2004). Ingjerd has returned to Norway, but will be returning again to the Stout, later in the year.

Graeme Aitken

Author/Researcher

Graeme Aitken is a 70-year-old who, over his career, 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.

Professor Takeshi Ohno

Takeshi Ohno is professor of Labour Sociology in College of Social Science at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. He is the author of Work in Lean Production System: Based on Participant Observations at Automobile Factories, Ochanomizu Press, Tokyo which received the Incentive Award from the Japanese Association of Labor Sociology in 2004. His research interests include international comparison of industrial relations and labour protections laws, especially minimum wage laws. Among his latest papers are: ‘1130-1212 Birth of Craft Gilds in England and London’s Wage Regulation Ordinance,’ and ‘Anti-Sweating Campaign and the First Minimum Wage Law in the United States: Compared to the United Kingdom.’ As New Zealand is the first country to enact the minimum wage law in the world, he is delighted to be accepted by the Stout Research Center as a visiting scholar. Professor Ohno will arrive in September 2024.

Dr Doug Munro

BA Flinders University, PhD Macquarie University, FRHistS

Research

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.