Dr Chris Hilliard

BA, MA (Auckland), PhD (Harvard)
Senior Lecturer and Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow
Brennan-MacCallum Building, room 817

+61 2 9036 6032

Research areas

Modern British cultural and intellectual history, New Zealand history

Current projects

I am currently working on two projects: a book on the critical and educational movement associated with the journal Scrutiny, and a study of the relationship between popular reading, law, and citizenship in England between 1867 and 1960.

Selected publications

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.

“The Provincial Press and the Imperial Traffic in Fiction, 1870s-1930s,” Journal of British Studies, 48, no. 3 (July 2009): 653-673.

“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

I am currently on a research fellowship, which means that I won’t be offering units of study in the next few years. I will be supervising Honours and PhD theses as usual, however. I welcome research students in modern British history (especially the twentieth century) and in New Zealand history. I am currently supervising postgraduate students working on Mass-Observation and the problem of leisure in interwar Britain; on Frederick Rolfe and “Corvine” collectors; and on the idea of causality in Victorian culture.

Conference Activity

In September 2009 I was a keynote speakers at a conference marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. In the last few years, I have presented papers at the North American Conference on British Studies in San Francisco, the European Association for Studies of Australia conference in Copenhagen, and the Australian Modern British History Association conference in Sydney.

Other Professional Contributions

I am currently Associate Dean (Honours) in the Faculty of Arts.

I am a member of the International Board of Twentieth Century British History and the 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.