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Associate Professor Chris Hilliard

BA, MA (Auckland), PhD (Harvard)
Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow
Brennan-MacCallum Building, room 817

+61 2 9036 6032

Research areas

Modern British cultural and intellectual history, New Zealand history

Current projects

I recently completed a book manuscript for Oxford University Press on the critical and educational movement associated with the journal Scrutiny. My current research is on the relationship between popular reading, law, and citizenship in England between 1867 and 1960.

Selected publications

  • ‘Working-Class Fiction’, in Patrick Parrinder, gen. ed., The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 4, The Reinvention of the British Novel 1880-1940, ed. Patrick Parrinder and Andrzej Gasiorek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 522-535.
  • ‘Licensed Native Interpreter: The Land Purchaser as Ethnographer in Early 20th-Century New Zealand’, Journal of Pacific History, 45, no. 2 (September 2010): 229-245.
  • ‘The Provincial Press and the Imperial Traffic in Fiction, 1870s-1930s’, Journal of British Studies, 48, no. 3 (July 2009): 653-673.
  • ‘The Literary Underground of 1920s London’, Social History, 33, no. 2 (May 2008): 164-182.
  • ‘Producers by Hand and by Brain: Working-Class Writers and Left-Wing Publishers in 1930s Britain’, Journal of Modern History, 78, no. 1 (March 2006): 37-64.
  • The Bookmen’s Dominion: Cultural Life in New Zealand, 1920-1950 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006).
  • To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
  • ‘Modernism and the Common Writer’, Historical Journal, 48, no. 3 (September 2005): 769-787.
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Areas of teaching and research supervision

I am currently on a research fellowship, which means that I won’t be offering units of study in the next few years. I am supervising Honours and PhD theses as usual, however, and welcome research students in modern British history and New Zealand history. I led the first-year postgraduate seminar in semester 1, 2010, and, with Professor Glenda Sluga, coordinated the modern European postgraduate seminar in the first half of 2011.

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Conference Activity

In the last few years I have presented papers in Hong Kong, Melbourne, and Wellington, where I was a keynote speaker at a conference marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University.

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Other Professional Contributions

I am a member of the International Board of Twentieth Century British History and the Editorial Advisory Group of the New Zealand Journal of History. In recent years I have been associate dean for honours and served on the dean’s curriculum taskforce.

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