Arts students awarded Auckland War Memorial Museum Library Research Grants
The Auckland War Memorial Museum has recently awarded $20,000 worth of library research grants to seven Faculty of Arts students.
Designed to help attract more Faculty of Arts students and staff to its Research Library, the Museum’s offer generated strong interest among students and staff, with 17 high quality applications sent to the Museum and Cultural Heritage selection committee.
The seven successful applicants will present their research to an audience at the Auckland War Memorial Museum or alternatively, within a thesis publication.
Research will primarily use the Museum Library’s documentary heritage, manuscripts and archives, photographs, ephemera, maps, publications including early newspapers resources and will focus on one or more of the following programmes:
- Auckland studies
- Origin, evolution and biogeography of the flora and fauna of New Zealand
- History and development of cultures
- Significance and meaning of collections associated with human history
- New Zealanders at war
The seven successful students are:
Alex Jespersen - European Languages and Literatures
To investigate the content and role of The Pull-thro’ , a periodical produced by the New Zealand Expeditionary Force soldiers stationed in Samoa during the New Zealand military occupation of German Samoa during World War 1.
Charlotte Warner - Anthropology
Research into the manner in which archival and material records might be combined to produce an alternative reading of the past. Research is into Ewelme Cottage, Auckland, and the Lush family who owned this cottage for more than 100 years. Records provide a context and on-going insight into the lives of family members and offer the potential for a unique view of Auckland’s history.
Genevieve de Pont - History
Research centred on travel diaries written by New Zealanders who journeyed abroad between the end of the First World War and 1963. The project aims to shed light on the diversity of travel experiences in this period, the travel cultures these tourists participated in, and the creative ways they recorded and processed their experiences.
Georgie Craw - History
An estimated one thousand Māori travellers left New Zealand during the period 1769-1840. This thesis aims to interrogate not only the overseas experiences of Māori who left New Zealand as the companions of Europeans, but also of the Māori travellers who worked on ships and found themselves in all corners of the world. Such a study of Māori mobility and activity may work to suggest that they were more cosmopolitan prior to the 1840s than is popularly believed
Jennifer Ashton - History
Utilising a series of digitised ink drawings made by John Webster during a trip through the Pacific during the early 1850s, I will use the drawings as the basis of a study of Webster’s Pacific voyage particularly from the point of view of his evolving ethnological views of the Pacific peoples, how they differed from location to location and how these views were shaped by his interaction with local populations.
Richard Wolfe - Art History
I intend to examine the process whereby the indigenous cultures of the Pacific region have been collected and exhibited in the museums of Europe, and subsequently, New Zealand.
My study will cover such areas as early collection and exhibition policies, the transition in classification from ethnology to art, the implications of biculturalism, and the extent to which indigenous societies are able to determine developments within museums.
Rigel Sorzano - Art History
Historiography and analysis of archival material relating to the exhibition of New Zealand applied arts and design objects from 1840 to date, nationally and internationally. Part of wider research relating to critical frameworks for understanding and experiencing applied arts and design objects.
