Three days after his third son’s birth, Michael Stevens, a lecturer in the Department of History and Art History at the University of Otago, was awarded the Royal Society of New Zealand’s prestigious and highly competitive Marsden Fund Fast-Start Grant worth $300,000. The grant enables Michael to carry out a three-year research project entitled “Between Local and Global: A World History of Bluff.” The major output of Michael’s work will be a monograph looking at the port’s evolution between 1800 and 2000.

Michael believes his historical case study of the port – writing about the Māori past – will re-shape thinking about New Zealand’s economic development and race relations. [Read more…]