Contributors

Rachel Barrowman is the author of four books, including Mason: The Life of R. A. K. Mason (Victoria University Press, 2003), which won the Montana New Zealand Book Award for biography in 2004. She is currently based at the Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, working on a biography of novelist Maurice Gee, for which she was awarded the Creative New Zealand Michael King Writers' Fellowship in 2006.

Stephen Hamilton gained a PhD in New Zealand literature from the University of Auckland in 1996. He has published extensively in the fields of literary, social and cultural history. His history of the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association, A Radical Tradition, appeared in 2002. In 2001 he was appointed to the role of historian on the Waitangi Tribunal’s Tauranga Moana enquiry. Since 2003 his main interest has been in the collection, preservation and promotion of historical archives. He currently works as a freelance book editor, historian and heritage consultant, and as an archivist with the Hamilton City Library.

Paul Hunt was a Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Otago with expertise in Otago’s settler literature when he wrote his essays on Bracken and Wright. He has now retrained to practice medicine, and currently works in the emergency department of Hutt Hospital.

Daphne Lawless's 2003 doctoral thesis looked at early New Zealand women's popular fiction from a Marxist-feminist perspective. She currently lives in Auckland, where she works in publishing, edits the socialist journal UNITY, and performs and records original electronic pop music.

Tim McKenzie studied English literature and Law at Victoria University of Wellington, completing English Honours in 1995. He then undertook doctoral study at Glasgow University's Centre for the Study of Literature, Theology & the Arts. His thesis, published in book form in 2003, examined the twin vocations of the priest-poets George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and R. S. Thomas. After stints working in the public service and teaching at the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, Tim returned to Victoria as Anglican chaplain in 2006. Life followed criticism, if not art, when Tim was ordained as an Anglican priest in 2008.

Paul Millar is a Senior Lecturer in New Zealand Literature at the University of Canterbury. He has published extensively on New Zealand literature, particularly the poetry of James K. Baxter. His current project is a biography of novelist and critic Bill Pearson. No Fretful Sleeper: A Life of Bill Pearson is forthcoming from Auckland University Press.

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 Newton teaches in the English Department, University of Canterbury, and is the author of a number of scholarly articles about New Zealand's mid-twentieth-century literary culture. His study of James K. Baxter and the Jerusalem Commune is due from Victoria University Press in 2009.

Brian Opie is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has interests in English Renaissance and post-modern literature, with particular reference to the relations between literature and technology. He convened the History of Print Culture in New Zealand research programme, a collaboration with the Alexander Turnbull Library and other national histories of the book, to which his electronic edition of The Poetry of William Golder is a continuing contribution. He is Executive Director of Te Whāinga Aronui The Council for the Humanities.

Sarah Shieff is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Waikato. Her main teaching and research areas are New Zealand literature and cultural history, literary theory, Gothic fiction, and contemporary Jewish writing. Recent and forthcoming publications include essays on Keri Hulme's the bone people, race and racism in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, and a history of the Jewish contribution to music in New Zealand. She is currently preparing a critical edition of the letters of Frank Sargeson. Sarah is the editor of The Journal of New Zealand Literature.

Jane Stafford is an Associate Professor in English at Victoria University of Wellington. She has published extensively on New Zealand literature and is the co-author, with Mark Williams, of Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872-1914 (Victoria Universoty Press, 2006). She is currently conducting research for a proposed book titled ‘Native Empire: Victorian Literature and the Indigenous Writer.’

Peter Whiteford is an Associate Professor in the Victoria University of Wellington English Programme, and currently Head of the School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies, with research interests in both medieval and New Zealand literature. His publications include Selected Poems of Eileen Duggan (1994), Vibrant with Words: the letters of Ursula Bethell (2005) and (with Bill Manhire) Still Shines When You Think of It: A Festschrift for Vincent O'Sullivan (2007). He was the founding editor of Kōtare in 1998.

Mark Williams is a Professor in the English Programme at the University of Canterbury, teaching at Victoria University of Wellington in 2008 on exchange. His research has focused on New Zealand and modern literature. He has published widely in both fields since the mid 1980s and is on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly journals, including Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Canadian Literature. He is the co-author, with Jane Stafford, of Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872-1914 (Victoria University Press, 2006).