Biography

I am a graduate student of history from Aotearoa with a background in legal practice and passion for literary criticism. I studied law and history at the University of Otago before clerking at the High Court of New Zealand and practising as a barrister. In 2019, I returned to my first love: history. As an Ertegun Scholar at the University of Oxford, I completed an MSt in Global and Imperial History, focusing on forgotten 'insider' (or indigenous) and revisionist anthropology. At Cambridge, my PhD research focuses on the intersectional anticolonial protest and revisionist history of Māori women activist-intellectuals in the late 20th century. My work has a significant focus on the transnational connections and collaborations behind this scholarship and activism, and especially on Mana Wahine theory—what some people render as Māori feminism. Weaving Oceania into a global intellectual history of worldmaking after empire, this research explores how Māori women transformed emancipatory ideologies and practices to resist and alter colonial power in New Zealand and further afield.

I have contributed to leading texts on feminist legal theory and the history of eugenics, and have written about the collective memory of empire and global histories of the Anthropocene. I regularly review books for literary journals. I am committed to forging a social, supportive, and intellectually stimulating community, and hope that my academic work and career will help to inform and develop public opinion.

Previous Education

University of Oxford Global and Imperial History 2020
University of Otago History 2015
University of Otago Law 2014