Nau mai haere mai – welcome to my latest blog venture! I’ve been blogging for a couple of years at University of Otago 1869-2019 about my current major project, a 150th anniversary history of that university, and I also write the occasional post for The Hocken Blog, as I work there part-time. The inspiration to start the university history blog came from my experience with my previous book, Born to a changing world: childbirth in nineteenth-century New Zealand. After the book came out people got in touch with fascinating additional information on some of the women I’d written about, and helped me identify a photograph of a previously unidentified woman and baby. This brought home to me the value of sharing research before formal publication! Blogs are also handy for sharing stories that will probably never make it into print.

I’ve started this blog so I can share stories about some of my ‘other’ research – in other words, not the history of the university stuff. Sometimes it will be information relating to new projects, and sometimes something new on an older research topic (you can check out what my history interests are on the ‘historical interests‘ page). Sometimes posts will simply relate to some obscure topic or other I feel the urge to write about!

Happy reading, and your comments on anything I write here are most welcome.