Recipients

Violeta Gilabert

Violeta completed her PhD research under the supervision of Professor Mark Seymour and Associate Professor Angela Wanhalla at the University of Otago in 2019. An inaugural recipient of the Barnes-Whitehead History Innovation Fund Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2021, she has secured a publishing contract with Auckland University Press. Her manuscript, He Aroha Hou: Modern Love and Marriage in Aotearoa New Zealand, follows the romantic relationships of diverse men and women from courtship and engagement to marriage and parenthood, concluding in the premature partings and expected ends seen in divorce and death. Drawing on seldom-seen archives of married love, reminiscences of their making, records of their timely and untimely conclusions, her project joins the intimate lives of everyday New Zealanders to cultural and economic shifts prompted by war, urbanisation, sexual liberation, cultural renaissance, and women’s liberation.

Matthew Birchall

Matthew specialises in British imperial history, with a particular interest in colonial Australia and New Zealand. His first article, “History, Sovereignty, Capital: Company Colonisation in South Australia and New Zealand,” Journal of Global History, 16 (2021), won the Royal Historical Society’s Alexander Prize for best scholarly article based upon original research. He is using the History Innovation Fund Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on two projects that situate New Zealand history in global context.

The first is a monograph that explores how company colonisation drove settler colonial expansion after 1815. Tentatively entitled Empire, Inc. How Company Colonisation Transformed the Settler World, the book would be the first historical account to put forward a Pacific-oriented history of chartered enterprise.

He is also working on a critical edition of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s A Letter from Sydney (1829). Written in Newgate prison, where Wakefield was serving a three-year sentence for abducting a young heiress, A Letter caused a sensation when it was first published. It inspired the foundation of new colonies, and it was debated by intellectual luminaries such as J.S. Mill and Karl Marx. It could not be ignored. The volume aims to place this most enigmatic of texts in world-historical context.

Matthew completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2021.

Sasha Rasmussen

Sasha completed her DPhil in History at the University of Oxford in 2021, under the supervision of Associate Professors Julia Mannherz and Christina de Bellaigue. Her thesis – Feminine Feelings: Women and Sensation in Paris and St Petersburg, 1900-1910 – explores the sensory landscape of women’s daily lives, illuminating how femininity was constructed as embodied practice and connecting individual somatic experience to wider social and cultural trends. Her first article, ‘Musicians, Students, Listeners: Women and the Conservatoire in pre-war Paris and St Petersburg’ appeared in Social and Cultural History in 2021. More broadly, her research interests encompass urban history, intimacy, histories of sexuality and the body, music, and dance. As a 2022 Barnes-Whitehead History Innovation Fund Postdoctoral Research Fellow, she is working on two main projects: adapting her thesis for publication as a monograph, and conducting preliminary research for a new project on relationships between women in Russia and the Baltic during the revolutionary period. 

Branka Bogdan

Branka completed her PhD at Monash University in March 2020 under the supervision of Paula Michaels and Michael Hau. Nominated for the Mollie Holman Doctoral Medal, Branka’s dissertation analysed reproduction, contraception, and abortion in socialist Yugoslavia, 1945-90. Her research revealed that reproductive regulation played a key role in Yugoslav state formation in the second half of the twentieth century. Her manuscript The ‘New Yugoslav Woman’: Reproductive Regulation in Socialist Yugoslavia is in development for publication by Indiana University Press. Branka’s work as a 2022 Barnes-Whitehead History Innovation Fund Postdoctoral Writing Fellow examines the history of menopause and medical and naturopathic treatment of menopausal symptoms in Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1970-2000. Branka is also a research fellow at the Liggins Institute at the University of Auckland where she is researching and co-authoring a book on the history of the Auckland Antenatal Steroid Trial (1969-1974) and the development of fetal medicine in New Zealand in the second half of the twentieth century. Her research interests include histories of gender and sexuality, and particularly how they intersect with histories of medicine, science, and technology. She is also inspired by popular media, art, and exhibitions, as well as oral history in her research and writing.