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Miranda Johnson profile photo.Postgraduate Co-ordinator (MA and PhD)

Contact details

Room 2S8, Arts 1 (Burns) Building
Tel +64 3 479 5761
Email miranda.johnson@otago.ac.nz

Academic qualifications

  • 2008: PhD University of Chicago
  • 2003: MA University of Auckland
  • 2000: BA (Hons) Victoria University of Wellington

Research interests

Miranda is a historian of colonialism and decolonisation, focusing on issues of settler identity, race, indigeneity, citizenship, and the politics of writing history. Her research focuses on Anglophone settler societies of the South Pacific and North America.

Her first book, The Land is Our History: Indigeneity, Law and the Settler State (Oxford University Press, 2016) examined the wide-ranging effects of legal claims of Indigenous peoples in the settler states of New Zealand, Australia, and Canada in the late twentieth century. It won the W. K. Hancock Prize in 2018 from the Australian Historical Association.

She is currently finishing a book provisionally titled: Redeemer Nation: Myth, History and the Politics of Indigeneity in a Southern Settler State. This book examines the fraught imaginary of ‘biculturalism’ in Aotearoa New Zealand, paying particular attention to history-making and changing historical consciousness over the past five decades.

With Associate Professor Paerau Warbrick (Te Tumu) she is collating a collection of Māori petitions to the colonial New Zealand and British imperial governments in the nineteenth century. This is funded by a University of Otago Research Grant.

She has held prestigious fellowships overseas including a postdoctoral fellowhips with the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. She was a tenure-track professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, where she maintains a research affiliation. She is past-president of the New Zealand Historical Association. In 2026, she was awarded the Ian Langham Memorial Prize in History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, which honours work that speaks to the political, social, and economic implications of scientific change.

Areas of research supervision

Miranda welcomes students in Pacific, Australian, New Zealand and North American history, with a focus on race, indigeneity, and settler identity in contexts of colonialism, decolonization, and postcolonialism, as well as in intersecting areas of environmental, political and constitutional histories.

She is particularly interested in working with students on questions of historical practice and theory and the politics of remembering and forgetting.

Current supervision

  • Rohan Knap, MA thesis
  • Annie Leen, MA thesis
  • Andrew Lorey, PhD (co-supervisor)
  • Amy Sellwood, MA thesis (co-supervisor)

Recently completed supervision

  • May Kotsen, MA
  • Georgina White, PhD

Teaching

Editorial responsibilities

Miranda is section editor Australasia and Pacific for History Compass. She is on the international editorial board of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.

Publications

Johnson, M. (2026, June). Indigenous knowledge and neoliberalism. Seminar for the Institute for Contemporary Critical Thought (ICCT), London, UK. [Research Presentation]. Other Research Output

Johnson, M. (2026, June). Decolonization and settler states. Verbal presentation at the Cambridge Companion to 20th Century Decolonization Workshop, Copenhagen, Denmark. Conference Contribution - Verbal presentation and other Conference outputs

Johnson, M. (2026, February). Interview with Miranda Johnson on Chiefly Women. The Royal Studies Podcast, hosted by Ellie Woodacre. Retrieved from https://royalstudies.buzzsprout.com/1934722/episodes/18693406-interview-with-miranda-johnson-on-chiefly-women Other Research Output

Johnson, M. (2026). Resistance and insistence: Making postcolonial Indigenous rights. In S. Moyn & M. Terretta (Eds.), The Cambridge history of rights (Vol. V): The twentieth and twenty-first centuries. (pp. 394-420). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/9781108938839 Chapter in Book - Research

Johnson, M., McCarthy, C., & Schorch, P. (2026). Using the past in the present for the future. Museum History Journal. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1080/19369816.2025.2607316 Journal - Research Other

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