Professor Tony Ballantyne, FRSNZ, is Deputy-Vice-Chancellor External Engagement at the University of Otago.
The External Engagement Division is responsible for raising the profile of the University and attracting high quality domestic and international students to study at Otago. The Division embraces a global outlook and leads and promotes activities to increase engagement, both nationally and internationally, and seeks to build lasting relationships with key stakeholders. The Division includes Development and Alumni Relations, Centre for Asia-Pacific Excellence, Communications, International, Marketing, Schools Liaison, Undergraduate Entrance Scholarships and the Auckland Centre.
Academic qualifications
- 1999: PhD, Cambridge
- 1993: BA(Hons), University of Otago
Research interests
Tony is recognised as a world-leading historian of the modern British empire. He has worked extensively on the development of colonial knowledge, changing understandings of language, religion and race, and the uneven “webs” of exchange and connection that gave the empire shape.
In recent years, much of his research has come to focus on the changing place of New Zealand within the British Empire. He has published extensively on missionaries, literacy and print culture, cultural mobility and histories of place, and empire and colonisation in cultural memory. He is currently completing a volume on the changing place of James Cook in New Zealand memory and culture.
His current research primarily focuses on the development of colonial knowledge in southern New Zealand, a long-running project that was originally supported by a grant from the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He is currently working on a set of related monographs on this material, including a study of the collector and historian Herries Beattie.
Tony has often worked collaboratively. He has a long-standing collaboration with Antoinette Burton from the University of Illinois. Their most recent works are Empires and The Reach of the Global, 1870-1945, published by Harvard University Press; and a co-edited volume entitled World Histories From Below: Dissent and Disruption with Bloomsbury Press, which is into its second expanded edition.
He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2012 and in 2016 won its Humanities Aronui Medal for sustained innovation in Humanities research.
Editorial responsibilities
Tony is currently on the editorial boards of:
- Journal of Punjab Studies
- Journal of New Zealand Studies
- Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Areas of research supervision
- Colonial knowledge
- Imperial networks
- Print culture
- Cultural and intellectual life in 19th century New Zealand, especially Otago and Southland
Publications
Ballantyne, T. (2014). Entanglements of empire: Missionaries, Māori, and the question of the body. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 360p.
Ballantyne, T. (2012). Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand's colonial past. Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget Williams Books, 374p.
Ballantyne, T., & Burton, A. (2012). Empires and the reach of the global: 1870-1945. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 227p.
Ballantyne, T. (2011). Paper, pen, and print: The transformation of the Kai Tahu knowledge order. Comparative Studies in Society & History, 53(2), 232-260. doi: 10.1017/S0010417511000041
Ballantyne, T. (2010). The changing shape of the modern British Empire and its historiography. Historical Journal, 53(2), 429-452. doi: 10.1017/S0018246X10000117
Ballantyne, T. (2014). Entanglements of empire: Missionaries, Māori, and the question of the body. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 360p.
Authored Book - Research
Ballantyne, T. (2012). Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand's colonial past. Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget Williams Books, 374p.
Authored Book - Research
Ballantyne, T., & Burton, A. (2012). Empires and the reach of the global: 1870-1945. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 227p.
Authored Book - Research
Ballantyne, T. (2011). Paper, pen, and print: The transformation of the Kai Tahu knowledge order. Comparative Studies in Society & History, 53(2), 232-260. doi: 10.1017/S0010417511000041
Journal - Research Article
Ballantyne, T. (2010). The changing shape of the modern British Empire and its historiography. Historical Journal, 53(2), 429-452. doi: 10.1017/S0018246X10000117
Journal - Research Article
Ballantyne, T. (2011). On place, space and mobility in nineteenth-century New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of History, 45(1), 50-70.
Journal - Research Article
Ballantyne, T. (2010). Thinking local: Knowledge, sociability and community in Gore's intellectual life, 1875-1914. New Zealand Journal of History, 44(2), 138-156.
Journal - Research Article
Ballantyne, T., & Burton, A. (Eds.). (2009). Moving subjects: Gender, mobility, and intimacy in an age of global empire. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 353p.
Edited Book - Research
Ballantyne, T. (2006). Between colonialism and diaspora: Sikh cultural formations in an Imperial world. Durham: Duke University Press, 229p.
Authored Book - Research
Ballantyne, T. (Ed.). (2007). Textures of the Sikh past: New historical perspectives. Oxford University Press, 328p.
Edited Book - Research
Ballantyne, T., & Moloughney, B. (Eds.). (2006). Disputed histories: Imagining New Zealand's pasts. Dunedin, New Zealand: Otago University Press, 283p.
Edited Book - Research
Ballantyne, T., & Burton, A. (2009). Introduction: The politics of intimacy in an age of empire. In T. Ballantyne & A. Burton (Eds.), Moving subjects: Gender, mobility, and intimacy in an age of global empire. (pp. 1-30). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Chapter in Book - Research
Ballantyne, T. (2009). The State, politics and power, 1769-1893. In G. Byrnes (Ed.), The new Oxford history of New Zealand. (pp. 99-124). Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press Australia & New Zealand.
Chapter in Book - Research
Ballantyne, T. (2008). Colonial knowledge. In S. Stockwell (Ed.), The British empire: Themes and perspectives. (pp. 177-198). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Chapter in Book - Research
Ballantyne, T. (2007). What difference does colonialism make? Reassessing print and social change in an age of global imperialism. In S. Alcorn Baron, E. N. Lindquist & E. F. Shevlin (Eds.), Agent of change: Print culture studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. (pp. 342-352). Washington, DC: University of Massachusetts Press.
Chapter in Book - Research
Ballantyne, T., & Moloughney, B. (2006). Asia in Murihiku: Towards a transnational history of colonial culture. In T. Ballantyne & B. Moloughney (Eds.), Disputed histories: Imagining New Zealand's pasts. (pp. 65-92). Dunedin, New Zealand: Otago University Press.
Chapter in Book - Research
Ballantyne, T. (2006). Teaching Māori about Asia: Print culture and community identity in nineteenth-century New Zealand. In H. Johnson & B. Moloughney (Eds.), Asia in the making of New Zealand. (pp. 13-35). Auckland University Press.
Chapter in Book - Research
Ballantyne, T. (2011). Reading the newspaper in colonial Otago. Journal of New Zealand Studies, (12), 47-63.
Journal - Research Article
Ballantyne, T. (2005). Mr. Peal's archive: Mobility and exchange in histories of empire. In A. Burton (Ed.), Archive stories: Facts, fictions, and the writing of history. (pp. 87-110). Durham, UK: Duke University Press.
Chapter in Book - Research
Ballantyne, T. (2005). Putting the nation in its place?: World history and C. A. Bayly's The birth of the modern world. In A. Curthoys & M. Lake (Eds.), Connected worlds: History in transnational perspective. (pp. 23-44). Canberra, Australia: ANU E Press.
Chapter in Book - Research
Ballantyne, T. (2005). Religion, differeence, and the limits of British imperial history. Victorian Studies, 47(3), 427-456.
Journal - Research Other
Ballantyne, T. (2003). Rereading the archive and opening up the nation-state: Colonial knowledge in South Asia (and beyond). In A. Burton (Ed.), After the imperial turn: Thinking with and through the nation. (pp. 102-121). Durham: Duke University Press.
Chapter in Book - Research
Ballantyne, T. (2002). Empire, knowledge and culture: From proto-globalization to modern globalization. In A. G. Hopkins (Ed.), Globalization in World History. (pp. 116-140). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Chapter in Book - Research
Ballantyne, A. J. (2002). Orientalism and race: Aryanism in the British Empire. UK: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Study Series, Palgrave-MacMillan.
Authored Book - Research
Ballantyne, T., & Burton, A. (2012). Empires and the reach of the global. In E. S. Rosenberg (Ed.), A world connecting: 1870-1945. (pp. 285-434). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chapter in Book - Research
Ballantyne, T. (2010). Placing literary culture: Books and civic culture in Milton. Journal of New Zealand Literature, 28(2), 82-104.
Journal - Research Article
Ballantyne, T. (2014). Empires, modernisation and modernities. International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 2(1), 25-42. doi: 10.5117/HCM2014.1.BAll
Journal - Research Article
