Emma Gattey
I am an historian-in-training from Aotearoa New Zealand, with a background in legal practice and passion for literary criticism. I studied law and history at the University of Otago before clerking at the High Court of New Zealand and practising as a barrister. In 2019, I returned to my first love: history. As an Ertegun Scholar at the University of Oxford, I completed an MSt in Global and Imperial History, focusing on forgotten 'insider' (or indigenous) and revisionist anthropology.
With the support of a Gates Cambridge scholarship, my PhD research focuses on collaboration and conflict between Pākehā (settler European) feminists and Māori women activist-intellectuals in the late 20th century. Grounded in women’s writing and publishing – from periodicals and books to academic papers and graphic novels – my work has a significant focus on intersectionality, anticolonialism, revisionist history, and the transnational connections behind this scholarship and activism, and especially on Mana Wāhine theory—what some people render as Māori feminism. Weaving Oceania into a global intellectual history of worldmaking after empire, this research explores how Māori and Pākehā women transformed emancipatory ideologies and practices to resist and alter colonial power in New Zealand and further afield.
I regularly review for literary and academic journals, am co-editor of the Pacific Circle, and a Research Fellow at the University of Otago Law Faculty, working with Jacinta Ruru, Angela Wanhalla and Jeanette Wikaira on Te Takarangi.
Transnational anticolonialism, decolonization, postcolonial literature and theory, historiography, anthropology (especially Indigenous anthropology and auto-ethnography), colonial legal systems, judicial recognition of customary/Indigenous law, world environmental history, history of the Anthropocene, New Zealand history, global and imperial history.
Contact
Tags & Themes
Key publications
'Writing Back from the Academy: Uncovering the Unnamed Targets of Makereti's Revisionist Anthropology,' Modern Intellectual History (First View), 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244323000124
‘Beyond Caricature and Hubris: International Law and the Emancipatory Potential of Revisionist History in a Colonised Present,’ Global Intellectual History 7 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2023.2183877.
‘The Migration of Religion to New Zealand in the Shipboard Diaries of Scottish Presbyterians,’ Journal of Migration History 9:1 (2023), 78-105. https://doi.org/10.1163/23519924-09010004.
'Global Histories of Empire and Climate in the Anthropocene,' History Compass (2021). https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12683. (One of Wiley's most downloaded articles of 2021.)
'From Imperial Science to Post-Patriotism: The Polemics and Ethics of British Imperial History,' Global Histories 6:2 (2021), pp. 90-101. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17169/GHSJ.2021.357.
‘Sir Robert Stout as Freethinker and Eugenics Enthusiast’ in Diane B. Paul et al (eds.), Eugenics at the Edges of Empire: New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Africa (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 195-217
‘Waipapakura v Hempton’ in E. McDonald et al (eds.), Feminist Judgments of Aotearoa New Zealand: Te Rino – A Two-stranded Rope (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2017), pp. 354-61
Reviews
'Book Review: Jacinta Ruru and Linda Waimarie Nikora (Eds.), Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori Scholars at the Research Interface,' AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples (First View). https://doi.org/10.1177/11771801231177861.
'Review of Te Kai a te Rangatira: Leadership in the Māori world. Edited by Rawiri J. Tapiata, Renee Iritana Smith and Marcus Akuhata-Brown,' MAI Journal 11:1 (2022), 86-8. DOI: 10.20507/MAIJournal.2022.11.1.8.
‘Book Review: Kate Fullagar, The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire,’ Family & Community History 24:3 (2021), 289-303, https://doi.org/10.1080/14631180.2021.2038955.
‘At the Box,’ London Review of Books 44:4 (24 February 2022).
'Book Review: This Pākehā Life: An Unsettled Memoir,' AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, (March 2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/11771801211001569.