Staff Profile - Giselle Byrnes

BA Waikato, MA Waikato, PhD Auck
Chairperson

Telephone: +64 7 838 4466 ext 8349
Room: J3.24
Email: giselle@waikato.ac.nz

Professor Giselle Byrnes has, by her own admission, come full circle and has 'returned home' to the Waikato. Born in South Canterbury and raised there and in Tauranga, in the Bay of Plenty, Giselle completed her first two degrees at the University of Waikato before undertaking doctoral study at the University of Auckland. She has worked for the Waitangi Tribunal and in mid-2007 returned to The University of Waikato after some 10 years' teaching at Victoria University of Wellington. In 2006, Giselle was Fulbright Visiting Professor in New Zealand Studies at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Since mid-2008 Giselle has held the University leadership role of Pro Vice-Chancellor (Postgraduate Research and Supervision).

Giselle Byrnes was appointed to the University of Waikato in June 2007. Her teaching and research covers a range of topics in New Zealand history and trans-national and comparative histories, especially in colonial contexts. Other areas of expertise include New Zealand social and cultural histories, history and national identity, indigenous histories, encounter histories, Maori and iwi histories and the Treaty of Waitangi.

Giselle teaches New Zealand history, encounter histories and public histories. She currently teaches across a range of undergraduate papers, including HIST227 Encounter Histories in Aotearoa; HIST539 Social and Cultural Histories of Aotearoa/New Zealand and HIST510 Presenting the Past: Public Histories, as well as contributing to other papers. Her research and supervision interests include comparative history; theory and methodology; Maori and iwi histories; the Treaty of Waitangi; histories of science, exploration and travel; histories of landscape, colonial ethnographies, and New Zealand intellectual history. She is supervising a number of honours, master's and doctoral students across a range of these and other topics.

Giselle is also working, with her colleagues, to develop public history at the University - and in particular, to explore how history at University can connect with the community at large. She is working with local schools, and for the past four years, has advised on aspects of the implementation of the new History senior secondary school curriculum. Giselle sits on the editorial advisory board of the New Zealand Journal of History, is actively involved with Fulbright New Zealand, and in 2005 was elected as National President of the New Zealand Historical Association.

Giselle is known nationally and internationally for her work on Treaty issues and on critiques of national identity. She has been an invited keynote speaker at a number of international conferences, most recently the National Native Title Conference in Western Australia - and in September 2007 was invited to speak at the Prime Minister's 'Dominion Day Symposium' held at Parliament in Wellington.

Giselle has published extensively in the field of historical scholarship; she has two main monographs to her credit and the third, The New Oxford History of New Zealand, a revisionist multi-authored general history of New Zealand, is to be published in July 2009.

Giselle's book on land surveying, Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and the Colonization of New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2001) presented an alternative reading of the European colonization of New Zealand over the latter half of the nineteenth century, with particular reference to the work of land surveyors. According to one reviewer:

In Boundary Markers, Giselle Byrnes documents the role played by British surveyors in the colonization of New Zealand ... [and] addresses the way in which those surveyors prepared the land both physically and psychologically for British settlement. Such preparation included clearing New Zealand's vast forestland, demarcating the boundaries of crown land grants, laying out plans for towns, and determining place names. Along the way, surveyors had frequent contact with Maori, who had ceded sovereignty over New Zealand to Britain in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. Byrnes points out that the British and Maori understood the terms of the treaty differently, and that at any rate early British guarantees of Maori land rights gave way to pressure from settlers once the white population of New Zealand began to grow. Surveyors, whose work was a prerequisite to property ownership under common law, thus stood at the forefront of British settlement, representing figuratively and literally what Byrnes calls the 'cutting edge of colonization'.

Rather than being a historical narrative of the colonization of New Zealand, Boundary Markers concerns itself with the way in which colonization transformed the land, a process best exemplified through the imposition of British place names and town grids. As Byrnes points out, British place names did not merely reassure homesick colonists; they were assertions of hegemony, 'deliberate and provocative statements of power' (p. 80). Town grids likewise asserted mastery of territory that did not naturally lend itself to right-angle intersections. Yet Byrnes's most insightful contention lies in her identification of the surveyors' 'commercial gaze' - a view of the land through glasses tinted by the desire for profit. By naming the commercial gaze, Byrnes distinguishes British conceptions of landscape from those of the Maori.

Giselle's second monograph, published in 2004 by Oxford University Press, The Waitangi Tribunal and New Zealand History, considered the historical narratives produced by the Waitangi Tribunal as part of the modern Treaty claims process. This work examined the Tribunal not only in terms of how Maori and Pakeha perceive its procedure and efficacy, but also its place in the context of New Zealand history more broadly.

This book has been particularly well-received internationally: The journal History described it as:

an important contribution to the public and academic debates about the Waitangi Tribunal. This book fills a gap in publications about the Tribunal by bringing an academic's scrutiny to the Tribunal's publications in a form more accessible to the public than journal articles ... Byrnes's engagement with the international literature should make the book useful for all scholars interested in the history of European interactions with indigenous people ...

And the American Historical Review commented:

Byrnes has produced a truly seminal work. To date, there is no other book that even comes close to being such a robust, detailed, and insightful critique of the Tribunal's sweeping foray into New Zealand's history over the past 170 years. Moreover, it is the work of an academic who is fully at ease with her topic.

Giselle is currently working on a comparative study examining processes of apology and historical restitution in New Zealand and other contexts. She welcomes inquiries from scholars elsewhere and postgraduate students working in this and related fields. Giselle is especially interested in interdisciplinary supervision and research collaboration.

CURRENT RESEARCH

General Editor, 'The New Oxford History of New Zealand', Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2009

'Paying for the Past? History, Reparation and Guilt'

'Men on the Margins: A collective biography of Stephenson Percy Smith, Elsdon Best and Edward Tregear'

'Postcolonial Histories of Aotearoa/New Zealand'

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS
The Waitangi Tribunal and New Zealand History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2004, pp. vii + 222, ISBN 0195584341

Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and the colonisation of New Zealand, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2001, 158 pp, ISBN 187724290X

CHAPTERS (CONTRIBUTIONS TO BOOKS)
'What if the Treaty of Waitangi had not been signed on 6 February 1840?', in S. Levine, ed., New Zealand as it Might Have Been, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2006, pp. 27-39

'Pride and Prejudice: The Treaty of Waitangi and the 2005 General Election', in S. Levine and N. Roberts, eds, The Baubles of Office: The New Zealand General Election of 2005, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2006, pp. 305-14

'Nation and Identity in the Waitangi Tribunal Reports', in James H. Liu, Tim McCreanor, Tracey MacIntosh and Teresia Teaiwa, eds, New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2005, pp. 88-103

'Jackals of the Crown? Historians and the Treaty Claims Process', in Bronwyn Dalley and Jock Phillips, eds, Going Public: The Changing Face of New Zealand History, Auckland University Press, 2001, pp. 110-22

'Surveying Space: Constructing the Colonial Landscape', in Bronwyn Dalley and Bronwyn Labrum, eds, Fragments: Essays in New Zealand Social and Cultural History, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2000, pp. 54-75

JOURNAL ARTICLES
Co-author, Giselle Byrnes and David Ritter, 'Antipodean Settler Societies and their Complexities: the Waitangi Process in New Zealand and Native Title and the Stolen Generations in Australia', Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, vol. 46, issue 1, February 2008 , pp. 54–78

'By Which Standards? History and the Waitangi Tribunal: A Reply', New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 40, no. 2, 2006, pp. 214-29.

'Relic of 1840' or founding document? The Treaty, the Tribunal and concepts of time', Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online, 2006, vol. 1, pp. 1–12, available at http://www.rsnz.org/publish/kotuitui/2006/01.php

'Past the Last Post? Time, Causation and Treaty Claims History', in Law, Text, Culture, Special Issue 'Making Law Visible, Past and Present Histories and Postcolonial Theory', vol. 7, 2003, pp. 251-76

'Teaching Public History in New Zealand: The Story so far', in Public History Review, vol.10, 2003, pp.61-72

'”A dead sheet covered with meaningless words?” Place names and the cultural colonization of Tauranga', New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 36, no. 1, April 2002, pp. 18-35

'The New Zealand Experience: Outcomes, Research and Institutional Arrangements', in Balayi: Culture, Law and Colonialism, vol.5, 2002, pp.25-41.

'Jackals of the Crown? Historians and the Treaty Claims Process in New Zealand', The Public Historian, vol. 20, no. 2, Spring 1998, pp. 9-23 Awarded the G. Wesley Johnson Prize by the National Council on Public History for the Best Article published in The Public Historian in 1998

'Surveying - The Maori and the Land: An Essay in Historical Representation', New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 31, no. 1, 1997, pp. 85-98

INVITED PAPERS AND KEYNOTE ADDRESSES
'Rethinking national identity in New Zealand's history', Invited address at the Prime Minister's Symposium, 'Concepts of Nationhood: A Symposium to mark the centenary of the proclamation of Dominion status,' Parliament Buildings, Wellington, 26 September 2007, (forthcoming publication). This is also available on-line at http://www.mch.govt.nz/dominion/byrnes.html 

'The New Zealand Experience: Outcomes, Research and Institutional Arrangements', paper presented at the National Native Title Conference, Geraldton, Western Australia, 3-5 September 2002

'Pride and Prejudice: The Treaty of Waitangi and the 2005 General Election', paper presented at the '2005 Post-Election Conference', Wellington, 2 December 2005

OTHER
Sole author, 35 essays on New Zealand history subjects, for The World Book Enclyclopedia, World Book Publishing, Chicago, http://www.worldbookonline.com, 2006

'New Zealand', essay in Jennifer Speake, ed., Literature of Travel and Exploration, Volume 2, G to P (3 vols), Fitzroy Dearborn, New York and London, 2003, pp. 848-51

'New Zealand', essay in The World Book Enclyclopedia, Chicago, World Book Publishing, Chicago, 2001, pp. 346-57