Dr Chris Hilliard

BA, MA (Auckland), PhD (Harvard)
Senior Lecturer
Room 817 MacCallum Building

+61 2 9036 6032

Research areas

Modern British history, history and literature, popular intellectual life, New Zealand history

Current projects

• A study of “Leavisisite” literary and cultural criticism as a movement
• A chapter on working-class fiction for the Oxford History of the Novel

Selected publications

Books

To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

To Exercise Our Talents examines how people from backgrounds not traditionally conducive to literary careers sought to become writers, and the different things that literature and creativity meant to them. Parts of the book focus on working-class writers; other chapters examine a group for whom writing mattered in a less self-consciously political way—the middle-class men and women without higher education who formed writers’ groups in provincial cities, took courses and bought how-to-be-an-author magazines, and swapped their work with each other in postal “clubs”.

The Bookmen’s Dominion: Cultural Life in New Zealand, 1920-1950 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006).

This short book examines the structures and textures of literary life and the humanities in New Zealand from the 1920s to the 1940s. It explores the milieu and cultural conversations of the journalists, “amateur” historians, librarians and literary lawyers who were acted as the custodians of poetic taste and historical awareness before academics and graduates laid claim to these fields from the 1930s onwards.

Articles

“The Literary Underground of 1920s London,” Social History, 33, no. 2 (May 2008): 164-182.

“Producers by Hand and by Brain: Working-Class Writers and Left-Wing Publishers in 1930s Britain,” Journal of Modern History, 78, no. 1 (March 2006): 37-64.

“Modernism and the Common Writer,” Historical Journal, 48, no. 3 (September 2005): 769-787.

Areas of teaching and research supervision

Teaching

I will be on Australian Research Council-funded teaching relief for the first half of 2009. In the second semester of 2009, I will be teaching a new unit, HSTY2680: Living: Modern British Social History.

Supervision

I welcome research students in nineteenth- and especially twentieth-century British history, as well as New Zealand history. I am currently supervising postgraduate students working on Frederick Rolfe and on Mass-Observation.

Conference Activity

In the second half of 2007, I presented papers at the North American Conference on British Studies in San Francisco, the European Association for Studies of Australia conference in Copenhagen, the Australian Modern British History Association conference in Sydney, and a symposium on “Cultures of Writing” at the University of Otago. I also organized the program for the 2007 Australasian Association for European History conference in Sydney.

Other Professional Contributions

I am currently Associate Dean (Honours) in the Faculty of Arts. In 2008, I chaired the Faculty of Arts Library Committee.

I am a member of the International Board of Twentieth Century British History and Editorial Advisory Group of the New Zealand Journal of History.

In 2006 I was awarded the Crawford Medal by the Australian Academy of the Humanities.