Contributors

Emily Dobson has a BA (hons) in English Literature, specialising in New Zealand Literature, and an MA in Creative Writing, for which she was awarded the Adam Prize for best folio, from Victoria University of Wellington. Her poetry has been published widely in New Zealand and she is the author of A Box of Bees (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2005). In 2005/2006 she held the Schaeffer Fellowship to Iowa University’s Creative Writing Programme. She has worked as a sometime beekeeper, postie, singing teacher and life model and now lives in rural Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, with her husband.

Carole Ferrier is a professor at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, working in the area of women’s fiction in relation to questions of gender, race, class and sexuality. Her books include: Gender, Politics and Fiction: Australian Women’s Novels; As Good as a Yarn With You; Letters Between Franklin, Prichard, Devanny, Barnard, Eldershaw and Dark; The Janet Frame Reader; Jean Devanny: Romantic Revolutionary and Radical Brisbane. She is Director of the Centre for Research on Women, Gender, Culture and Social Change; she has edited the international interdisciplinary feminist journals Hecate since 1975; and she also edits the Australian Women’s Book Review.

Bruce Harding is the Curator of the Ngaio Marsh House in Cashmere (Christchurch, New Zealand) and interviewed Dame Ngaio, as a graduate student, in her final years. He is also an educator who divides his time between teaching senior English at Christchurch Boys’ High School and working as a Research Associate at Canterbury University’s Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies (where he has acted as Chair of its Publications Committee and Working Papers Editor). He also regularly reviews for The Press and the NZ International Review and other international journals on issues related to Maori and Pasifika constitutionalism and cultures and has taught the latter for the Department of Culture, Literature and Society

Kirstine Moffat is a lecturer in English at the University of Waikato. Her research interests include colonial New Zealand fiction, early feminist writing and nineteenth-century settlement and theological discourses. She has published articles in The Journal of New Zealand Literature, New Literatures Review and Kōtare and is currently writing a book on the cultural history of the New Zealand piano, 1827-1930.

John O’Leary specializes in the study of nineteenth-century settler writing in Australasia. His articles have appeared in a number of scholarly journals, while a book chapter on Grey’s translations of Maori myths and legends is to be found in For Better or For Worse: Translation as a Tool for Change in the South Pacific (2004). Recently John was a resident scholar at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington.

Mary Edmond-Paul has co-edited three anthologies the most recent of which is Gothic NZ: the darker side of Kiwi culture (2005). Her critical work Her Side of the Story (1999) contains 2 chapters on Robin Hyde and her edited collection of essays on Hyde (‘Lighted Windows’) will be published by Otago University Press mid-2008. Mary is currently working on a collection of Hyde’s autobiographical writing and is coordinator of the English programme at Massey University’s Albany (Auckland) campus.

Philip Steer is currently a graduate student in the English department at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina. He is writing a doctoral dissertation on how literary depictions of the Australasian settler colonies impacted the culture of Victorian Britain by modifying narratives about imperial space, national origins, liberal subjectivity and history. He has previously completed an MA in English at Victoria University with a thesis on representations of Pakeha identity in novels about New Zealand’s colonial wars.

Joanna Woods was born in Dublin, but has been based in Wellington since her marriage to a New Zealand diplomat. During the course of her husband’s career, she has lived in Bahrain, France, Greece, Iran, Italy, the United States and Russia, where she gained her doctorate on Katherine Mansfield from Moscow State University. Since her return to Wellington in 1999, Dr Woods has been a full time writer and has written three biographies, including Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield (Penguin, 2001). She has also contributed to several publications on Mansfield and is currently writing the text for a photographic album of Mansfield’s personal possessions. Her most recent biography, Facing the Music: Charles Baeyertz and the Triad, is due to be published by Otago University Press in early 2008.