Barbara Brookes

New Zealand

Barbara Brookes is a Professor of History at the University of Otago whose research, writing and teaching have contributed significantly to new perspectives on women’s history. She has explored a range of topics in imaginative ways, often in collaboration with scholars from different disciplines. Consistently, however, she has placed women at the centre of her research, and A History of New Zealand Women draws together many threads from some three decades of scholarly investigation. 

Publishing both internationally and in New Zealand, she has co-edited several books on women’s history and on health. These include: Bodily Subjects: Essays on Gender and Health, 1800–2000 (2014), with Tracy Penny Light and Wendy Mitchinson; Rethinking the Racial Moment: Essays on the Colonial Encounter (2011), with Alison Holland; Sites of Gender: Women, Men and Modernity in Southern Dunedin, 1890–1939 (2003), with Annabel Cooper and Robin Law; and two volumes on Women in History (1986, 1992), with Charlotte Macdonald and Margaret Tennant. Her work has also appeared widely in journals and in edited collections.