Biography

I was born in Christchurch, New Zealand. As an only child, reading was a crucial source of entertainment, and a uniquely important channel to other cultures and ideas. It was therefore natural for me to study English at university. I completed my BA(Hons) and MA at Victoria University of Wellington. For my Master's thesis I produced a scholarly edition of 'The Urewera Notebook', a diary kept by the writer Katherine Mansfield in 1907, while she was camping in remote parts of New Zealand. For this project I carried out extensive research amongst local Maori communities and my thesis was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2015. For the first time my academic writing reached a broad, international readership. This experience confirmed my desire to produce critical editions and literary criticism relevant to the popular as well as to the academic reader. The name Samuel Butler hovered at the edges of my consciousness as a child; he was a writer who farmed inland from Christchurch from 1859-1864. I became more interested in Butler while studying Mansfield; it struck me that the works of both writers offered perspectives on the cultural ‘pull’ of Empire, albeit through different eras and patterns of emigration and relocation. At Cambridge I aim to study Butler's satirical novel 'Erewhon', in order to consider its indebtedness to Butler's colonial experience, and to shed light on a period of New Zealand literary history that has been obscured in recent decades.

Previous Education

Victoria University of Wellington