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.