My PhD has begun…

I’ve set up this blog page to profile my work and to blog/journal my way through my PhD.

I am a PhD candidate in history on a Marsden trust scholarship.

My PhD will reconstruct mentalities and political argument concerning New Zealand’s constitutional evolutions, late 1830s-1860s, in both European and indigenous (Maori) worlds. Methodologically the work will reflect ‘Cambridge School’ and ‘New Imperial History’ priorities. It forms part of a wider Marsden-funded project at Massey University, led by Prof Michael Belgrave, which will explore the extent to which a civil society was created or imagined that  transcended the scattered European settlement and different Maori polities, allowing the wars of the 1860s to be seen as ‘civil wars’.