Melanie Nolan

Professor

M.A. (Hons) (1985, Canterbury)
Ph.D. (1990, Australian National University)

Contact details

Lectures in

HIST 120: What is History Today?
HIST 224: NewZealand Labour History: Work and Society 1870-1970 [Not offered in 2008]
HIST 228/320: Special Topic: Biography (Intensive Summer Course running 3 January to 15 February 2008)
HIST 324: Twentieth Century Australian and New Zealand Comparative History [Not offered in 2008]
HIST 419: History and Theory
HIST 424: Current Issues in Labour History: International Perspectives [Not offered in 2008]

Supervision
Areas in which Melanie is particularly interested in undertaking supervision of HIST 489, Masters or PhD theses:
20th century New Zealand and Australian social history; labour history, with particular interest in the politics of work. Please contact Melanie if you are interested in research projects in the areas.

Current supervisions:

PhDs

• Tanja Bueltmann ‘Patterns of Scottish Settler Identity in New Zealand, c1860- 1950’, PhD thesis (co-supervisors: Brad Patterson and Don MacRaild)
• Andrew Cutler, ‘Engineering Consent? Public Sector Public Relations in New Zealand 1923 – 1989’, PhD thesis (co-supervisor: Malcolm McKinnon)
• Andrew Francis, ‘ The impact of the Great War on New Zealand’s ‘alien’ residents’, PhD thesis (co-supervisor: Don MacRaild)
• Gerard Horn, ‘ Irish protestant migrants to 19th century New Zealand- a forgotten people?’, PhD thesis (co-supervisor Brad Patterson)
• Lisa Sacksen, 'Expressions of Resistance Marxist Organisations in New Zealand 1970-1992', PhD thesis (Co-supervisor: Giacomo Lichtner)

MAs

• Vivian Rodriguez, ‘Running Away from a Labour System: A Case Study of the Egypt Plantation, Jamaica 1751 – 1766 and Thomas Thistlewood’s Journals’, MA thesis. (co- supervisor Steve Behrendt)
• James Taylor, ‘Transnational ideas and activists: New Zealand labour and the British Clarion movement, 1890-c.1914’, MA thesis (co-supervisor Don MacRaild)
  (See list of past supervisions)

Current Research

Melanie is currently working on three book manuscripts:

• Shots in the Dark: Crime Fiction and Social History
• Fraternally Yours: Jack McCullough's Letters and Diaries
• Paperchase: Gender and Professional Society in Twentieth Century Australasia

Research Areas

• 20th century New Zealand and Australian social history
• labour history, with particular interest in the politics of work
• gender relations and comparative studies

Melanie Nolan is an Antipodean labour historian who researches New Zealand, Australian and comparative history, in particular the transformation of work and workers and the politics that has engendered since industrialization. Her PhD was on Australian shop and office workers, her books cover gender and skilled workers in New Zealand and she is currently writing a history of the rise of professional society in Australia and New Zealand. Her book Kin. The Collective Biography of a Working-class New Zealand Family won the 2006 Archives and Records Association of New Zealand (ARANZ) Ian Wards Prize. Her work has appeared in an array of international journals and in the last few years includes papers on British factory workers, too. She has edited books on international suffrage, the 1913 Great Strike in New Zealand and is working on a New Zealand diary.

Melanie wrote her MA (Hons) thesis while working in the New Zealand public service in industrial relations and, on the completion of her PhD, she worked for several years in what was then the Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs. She is an editorial member of Labour History, a journal of labour and social history. She is a long-standing member of the local Trade Union History Project which promotes and sustains labour history through the preservation of archives, an annual seminar and its support of publications.

More Publications by Melanie Nolan