Art students receive Auckland War Memorial Museum grants
The Auckland War Memorial Museum has recently awarded $20,000 in library research grants to six Arts students from The University of Auckland.
The grants are designed to attract students and staff from The University of Auckland to the Museum’s research library. The six successful applicants will present their research to an audience at the Auckland War Memorial Museum this time next year.
The students research focuses on the Museum library’s documentary heritage, manuscripts and archives, photographs, ephemera, maps, publications including early newspapers resources, focussed on the following research areas:
- New Zealand social history
- Origin, evolution and biogeography of the flora and fauna of New Zealand
- New Zealand’s role in international literature
- New Zealand’s botanical history and scientific nationalism
Ryan Bogardus - History will explore the do-it-yourself culture in post-war New Zealand under three broad headings: home maintenance, car maintenance and bach building and maintenance. The Auckland War Memorial Museum library has kindly offered to support research and publication of my final chapter on baches.
Anna Boswell – English will research the colourful correspondence conducted in the 1870s between F. E. Maning, a prominent New Zealand settler and author, and two successive secretaries and curators of Auckland Institute and Museum, Thomas Kirk and Thomas Cheeseman.
Jonathan Burgess – History research is on the visits of various preachers, theosophists, explorers, war correspondents, humourists, social commentators, spiritualists, authors and astronomers to New Zealand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; including speeches from Mark Twain, Frank Bullen, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Erica Kroger – English dissertation is on the work of Auckland playwright and writer Stella Jones paying special attention to her most well-known play The Tree (1959) and radio play Julia’s Day (1972). Jones provides a vital key to unlocking the history of ordinary Auckland and New Zealand women’s lives and the options available to them in the latter half of last century. Her seemingly innocuous reflection of the period gives an accurate commentary of the culture and sentiments of the day.
Charlotte Greenhalgh – History aims to establish when, why and how New Zealanders came to hold a social scientific view of their world. Charlotte will analyse participation in social research and how it first started to have implications for New Zealanders’ private lives and identities.
James Braund - School of European Languages and Literature will investigate one of New Zealand’s most important botanists, Leonard Cockayne (1855-1934), and his connections with German botanists Karl von Goebel (1855-1932) and Ludwig Diels (1874-1945) including the implications for New Zealand’s science, environmental history sense of scientific nationalism.
