Emeritus Professor Erik Olssen, ONZM, PhD (Duke), FRSNZ & FNZAH

Contact Details

Email: erik.olssen@otago.ac.nz

Research Interests

My main interest is the relationships between politics, society, ideas, culture, and economics. The ways in which they produce the lives of individuals and their societies has been a particular interest. Most of my research has been on New Zealand history and to a lesser extent the history of the United States, although comparative analyses within specific fields have often waylaid me. Since the late 1970s labour history and social history more generally have been my major research areas.

The ‘Caversham Project" has taken up much of my time since 1995. This project, which brings together labour and social history perspectives, has had two distinct phases. The first phase focussed on ‘Urban Society and the Opportunity Structure’, identifying the structures of social and geographical mobility and their inter-relationship with residential differentiation. The second phase, which focused on gender rather than class but continued to investigate structures and the ways in which they have changed, resulted in Sites of Gender, edited by Barbara Brookes, Annabel Cooper and Robin Law (Auckland University Press, 2003). For further information see the website.

The third phase focuses on marital, inter-generational and worklife mobility, and is to appear in the forthcoming An Accidental Utopia? Social Mobility and the Foundations of an Egalitarian Society. When that is finished I hope to return to my history of New Zealand.

Major Publications

• Erik Olssen and Bruce Scates, 'Class Formation and Political Change: A Trans-Tasman Dialogue', Labour History, No. 95  (Nov., 2008), pp. 3-24.
• An Accidental Experiment? The Social Bases of an Egalitarian Society, Hocken Lecture 2007, Dunedin, Hocken Library University of Otago, 2008.
• Erik Olssen and Maureen Hickey. Class and Occupation: The New Zealand Reality (University of Otago Press, 2005)
• With Miles Fairburn (eds). Class, Gender and the Vote: Historical Perspectives from New Zealand (University of Otago Press, 2005)
• Two interviews with Olssen: ‘The Shaping of a Field’, in Brian Moloughney and Tony Ballantyne, Disputed Hisories: Imagining New Zealand’s Pasts, Dunedin, University of Otago Press, pp. 215-32 and ‘Writing the Left into the Picture: An Interview with Erik Olssen’, in Pat Moloney and Kerry Taylor (eds), On the Left: Essays on Socialism in New Zealand, Dunedin, University of Otago Press, 2002, especially pp. 190-7.

Forthcoming Publications

• 'Towards a Reassessment of W. F. Massey, one of NZ's Greatest PM's (Arguably)', in James Wilson and Lachy Paterson (editors).
• Erik Olssen and Clyde Griffen, with Frank Jones: An Accidental Utopia? Social Mobility and the Foundations of an Egalitarian Society in Southern Dunedin, 1880-1940, University of Otago Press.
• History of the New Zealand Fruitgrowers Federation, 1991 - 2005.

Some Useful Links for Historians of New Zealand

NZHistory.net.nz
NewZealandSites.com/society/history/

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