Staff Profile - Catharine Coleborne

BA (Hons), MA Melb, PhD La Trobe

On Study Leave A Semester 2012

Telephone: +64 7 838 4674
Room: J3.03
Email: cathyc@waikato.ac.nz

Current Research

Externally Funded Research Grants
Catharine obtained a Fast Start Marsden grant 2004-2006 to find out more about families and their strategies for dealing with the mental breakdown of family members in colonial Australia and New Zealand 1860s-1914. The major outcome of this book is ‘Madness’ in the family: Insanity and institutions in the Australasian colonial world 1860s-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2010).

With Professor Angela McCarthy, Catharine holds a Marsden Grant 2009-2011, Royal Society of New Zealand, UOO-167-SOC. This project is culminating in a new book: Catharine Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire: Colonial institutional confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1870-1910 [under contract, Manchester University Press]

'Migration, Ethnicity, and Insanity in New Zealand and Australia, 1860-1910'
Committal to a mental hospital was but one possible outcome of dysfunction, despair, and social and economic hardship experienced by foreign-born migrants in nineteenth-century Australasia. Yet comparative analysis addressing issues of migration, ethnicity, and insanity has yet to be attempted in the Australasian sphere. This three-year project will therefore examine the difficulties that migrants underwent in adjustment abroad through a focus on asylums for the insane in Dunedin, Auckland, and Melbourne between 1860 and 1910. A range of sources, including institutional patient casebooks, will be utilised in conjunction with qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. The findings, situated within comparative, longitudinal, and transnational perspectives, will be disseminated in monographs, theses, journal articles, chapters, an edited collection, and public presentations.  Beyond enhancing the history of medicine, migration, and ethnicity in Australasia, the study will have international significance, contributing to the history of migration and ethnicity, and British, Irish, and European social history. Moreover, historians can contribute to current understandings of how migrants are affected by social change through migration by considering key factors of social isolation such as language and cultural misunderstandings; addressing issues of migration, ethnicity, and insanity in the past therefore has contemporary relevance and social value in the present.

The project includes a PhD Student based in History at the University of Waikato, Maree Dawson, who is writing a thesis about puerperal insanity, ethnicity and gender in New Zealand, 1860-1910, and is supervised by Catharine Coleborne, Angela McCarthy and James Beattie. A Masters student in History at Otago, Elspeth Knewstubb, produced her thesis about the gender, patients and the private institution in Dunedin, Ashburn Hall.  

Go to: http://www.otago.ac.nz/scottish_studies/marsden/intro.html

TEACHING

HIST117 Global Histories, 1900 - the present
HIST244 Travellers, Outlaws and Settlers: The Oceania Region 1800-1900
HIST319 Digital Histories
HIST326 Aspects of Social and Cultural History
      *In 2012, this paper focuses on histories of the family, sex and marriage, death and other topics!
HIST508 Sickness and Health in History

NEW PUBLICATIONS

Angela McCarthy and Catharine Coleborne (eds), Migration, Ethnicity, and Mental Health: International Perspectives, 1840-2010 (Routledge, New York: 2012)

Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (eds) Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (Routledge New York, 2011)

‘Locating ethnicity in the Hospitals for the Insane: Revisiting Casebooks as Sites of Knowledge Production about Colonial Identities in Victoria, Australia, 1873-1910’, in Migration, Ethnicity, and Mental Health: International Perspectives, 1840-2010, edited by Angela McCarthy and Catharine Coleborne(New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 73-90.

(with Dolly MacKinnon), ‘Seeing and not seeing psychiatry’, in Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (Routledge New York, 2011), pp. 3-13.

‘Collecting psychiatry’s past: collectors and their collections of psychiatric objects in Western histories’, in Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (Routledge New York, 2011), pp. 14-29.

Catharine Coleborne, ‘Regulating ‘mobility’ and masculinity through institutions in colonial Victoria, 1870s – 1890s’, Law Text Culture vol 15 (2011), pp. 45-71.

Catharine Coleborne and Elaine Bliss, 'Emotions, Digital Tools and Public Histories: Digital Storytelling using Windows Movie Maker in the History Tertiary Classroom', History Compass, 9 (2011): 1–12.

Lorelle Burke and Catharine Coleborne, ‘Insanity and ethnicity in New Zealand: Māori encounters with the Auckland Mental Hospital, 1860 – 1900’, History of Psychiatry 22:3 (September 2011), pp. 285-301.

Books
'Madness' in the family: Insanity and institutions in the Australasian colonial world 1860s-1914 (Under contract, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, due 2009, to appear in 2010)

Reading 'Madness': Gender and difference in the colonial asylum in Victoria, Australia, 1848-1880s, API Network, Western Australia, 2007.

Edited Works
Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (eds) 'Madness' in Australia: Histories, heritage and the asylum, St Lucia, Qld, University of Queensland Press/API Network, 2003.

Diane Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne (eds) Law, History, Colonialism: The reach of empire, Manchester UK, Manchester University Press, 2001, 2009, pp.307. Re-released in paperback version.

Book Chapters
‘Chapter 20: Health and illness, 1840s – 1990s’, in the New Oxford History of New Zealand, edited by Giselle Byrnes, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 487-509. Invited/commissioned 10,000 word chapter

‘Challenging Institutional Hegemony: Family visitors to hospitals for the insane in Australia and New Zealand, 1880s-1900s’ in Graham Mooney and Jonathan Reinharz eds, Permeable Walls: Historical Perspectives on Hospital and Asylum Visiting,  Clio Medica Series, Wellcome Institute, Rodopi, London, 2009, pp. 289-308.

‘Crime, the legal archive, and postcolonial histories’ in Crime and Empire 1840-1940: Criminal justice in local and global context Edited by Graeme Dunstall and Barry Godfrey, Willan Publishing, Devon, UK, 2005, pp. 92-105.

‘Introduction’, in Catharine Coleborne and  Dolly MacKinnon (eds) ‘Madness’ in Australia: Histories, heritage and the  asylum, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press with the API Network, 2003, pp. 1-8.

‘Collecting “madness”: psychiatric collections and the museum in Victoria and Western Australia’ in Catharine Coleborne and  Dolly MacKinnon (eds) ‘Madness’ in Australia: Histories, heritage and the  asylum, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press with the API Network, 2003, pp.183-194.

 ‘Space, gender and power in the asylum in Victoria’, in Catharine Coleborne and  Dolly MacKinnon (eds), ‘Madness’ in Australia: Histories, heritage and the asylum, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press with the API Network, 2003, pp. 49-60.

‘Passage to the asylum: the role of police in committals of the insane in Victoria, Australia, 1848 -1900’, Roy Porter and David Wright (eds), The Confinement of the Insane, 1800-1965: International Perspectives, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 129-148.

‘Hearing the “speech of the excluded”: re-examining “madness” in history’, in Joy Damousi and Robert Reynolds (eds) History on the Couch: Essays in History and Psychoanalysis, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2003, pp. 17-25.

‘Making “Mad” Populations in Settler Colonies: The Work of Law and Medicine in the Creation of the Colonial Asylum’, in Diane Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne (eds) Law, History, Colonialism: The reach of empire, Manchester UK, Manchester University Press, 2001, pp. 106-122.

Refereed Journal Articles/Other Articles
‘Reading insanity’s archive: reflections from four archival sites’ Provenance (No. 9, September,2010), pp. 29-41.

‘Pursuing families for maintenance payments to hospitals for the insane in Australia and New Zealand, 1860s-1914’, Australian Historical Studies, 40:3 (2009), pp. 308-22.

‘Families, insanity and the psychiatric institution in Australia and New Zealand,
1860 to 1914’, Health and History, 11:1 (2009) pp. 65-82.

‘Families, patients and emotions: Asylums for the insane in colonial Australia and New Zealand, 1880s-1910’, Social History of Medicine (Oxford UP, UK) vol 19, issue 3, December 2006, pp. 425-442.

(With Dolly MacKinnon) ‘Psychiatry and its Institutions in Australia and New Zealand: An Overview’, Special Issue of International Review of Psychiatry (Taylor and Francis/Routledge) 18:4, 2006, pp. 371-380.
*Invited/commissioned; edited by Sanjeev Jain, Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Molecular Genetics Laboratory, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India.

‘“His brain was wrong, his mind astray”: Families and the language of insanity in New South Wales, Queensland and New Zealand, 1880s-1910’, Journal of Family History (SAGE, UK) Vol 31, No. 1, January 2006, pp. 45-65.

(With Craig Hight), ‘Robert Winston’s Superhuman: spectacle, surveillance and patient narratives’, Journal of Health Psychology (TAYLOR & FRANCIS, UK), Special issue of refereed journal  ‘Health Psychology and the Media’, Vol 11: 2, 2006, pp. 233-45.

‘”Like a family where you fight and you roar”: Inside the ‘personal and social’ worlds of Tokanui Hospital, New Zealand, through an Oral History Project’, Oral History in New Zealand, 2004, pp. 17-27.

‘Preserving the institutional past and histories of psychiatry: Writing about Tokanui Hospital, New Zealand, 1950s-1990s’, Health & History, 5 (2) 2003, pp. 104-22.

‘Remembering Psychiatry’s Past: The Psychiatric Collection and its Display at Porirua Hospital Museum, New Zealand’, Journal of Material Culture (SAGE, UK) vol. 8 (1), 2003, pp. 99-119.

With Jim Hammerton, ‘Ten-Pound Poms Revisited. Battlers’ Tales and British Migration to Australia, 1947-1971’ in Journal of Australian Studies Issue ‘Scatterlings of Empire’, No.68, 2001, pp. 86-96.

‘Exhibiting “madness”: material culture and the asylum’, Health & History Vol. 3, No. 2, 2001, pp. 104-17.

‘The “scientific management” of the insane and the problem of “difference” in the asylum in Victoria, 1870s- 1880s’, Australasian Victorian Studies Annual, vol. 2,1996, pp. 126- 370

Journals edited

• Co-editor (with Christina Twomey) Australian Historical Studies
• Co-editor (with Hans Pols) Health & History
• Invited to the Editorial Advisory Board of new journal Medicine Studies (2009 -)
• Invited to be on the Editorial Board of Social History of Medicine, Oxford University Press, United Kingdom, for a term of three years (2007 -)
• Invited to be on the Editorial Advisory Board of the New Zealand Journal of History from 2007 for five years (2007 -)
• Book reviews editor Health & History (2005 - 2008)
• With Professor Giselle Byrnes, Special Issue of New Zealand Journal of History on Postcolonial Histories in New Zealand, April 2011.
• (With Dolly MacKinnon) Guest editor, Health & History: 'Histories of Deinstitutionalisation in Australia and New Zealand' (2003)
• (With Nan Seuffert) Guest editor, Law/Text/Culture, 'Making Law Visible: Past and Present Histories and Postcolonial Theory', vol 7 (2003)
  Go to: http://www.uow.edu.au/law/LIRC/LTC/vol7.html

Community Activities
2008- : Invited to join a research project in the Intellectual Disability Sector advising on oral histories of members of the ID community by Chris Harris, Chief Executive of the Spectrum Care Trust; project now seeking funds and I am being consulted on the application to the Frozen Funds Charitable Trust
2006-2012: Involved as an unpaid consultant with a group writing Tokanui Hospital's institutional history
2005-2006 - assisted Schizophrenia Fellowship Waikato to find a suitable graduate student to conduct interviews and write their 25 year history
2005 - : Trustee, Waikato Health Memorabilia Trust (ongoing)
2001 - 2005: Trustee, Waikato Medical Research Foundation Board of Trustees (resigned Dec 2005)