Barbara Brookes
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Barbara Brookes | |
|---|---|
 Brookes at a book-signing in Christchurch in 2016 | |
| Alma mater | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | History |
| Thesis | Abortion in England, 1919–1939 (1982) |
Barbara Lesley Brookes MNZM FRSNZ (born 1955) is a New Zealand historian and academic.[1][2] She specialises in women's history and medical history, publishing both internationally and in New Zealand. She worked at the University of Otago for more than 35 years, and when she retired in mid-2020 was made Professor Emerita.[3]
Brookes completed a bachelor's degree at the University of Otago in 1976, then won scholarships to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she completed a master's degree (1978) and a PhD (1982).[1][4] Her PhD thesis topic was abortion in England during the inter-war period.[4] Brookes was offered a post-doctoral scholarship at Otago and a permanent position in the university's Department of History in 1983.
In 1986, Brookes and her colleague Dorothy Page introduced the first university-level women's history paper in New Zealand.[4] In 2004, Brookes became head of the Department of History and guided the amalgamation of the department with the art history department to form the Department of History and Art History. She held the position until 2012.[4]
Brookes has had a continuing interest the history of mental illness and, together with Jane Thomson, published a collection of research students’ essays “Unfortunate Folk: Essays on Mental Health Treatment (University of Otago Press, 2001) and most recently, Barbara Brookes and James Dunk, eds. Knowledge Making: Historians, Archives and Bureaucracy (Routledge, 2020). Her international collaborations include the volume edited with Tracy Penny Light and Wendy Mitchinson, Bodily Subjects: Essays on Gender and Health, 1800-2000 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014).
In 2021 Brookes was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi. The society said that Brookes' research "has contributed to a vast international expansion of the historical canon from the 1970s, particularly in relation to the history of gender. It continues to be innovative and widely published".[5][6]
A History of New Zealand Women
Brookes' sole-authored publication, A History of New Zealand Women (Bridget Williams Books, 2016), won the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Award in the Illustrated Non-Fiction category.[7] The book represents over thirty years of research on the topic of New Zealand women's history (inaugurated by a 1986 volume Brookes co-edited with Margaret Tennant and Charlotte Macdonald, Women in History).
Marion Castree describes A History of New Zealand Women as "a superb New Zealand history through the perspective of women's lives and all they contributed to our comparatively short but intense experience in Aotearoa. . . . Beautifully illustrated and designed, this book will never date."[8] Susanna Andrew, writing for noted.co.nz, says the book is "a brilliant examination of how we got to where we are now. […] Brookes has marked every change and shift with clarity and scholarly precision." Charlotte Paul, writing for the New Zealand Medical Journal, says that Brookes "weaves different perspectives of Māori and Pakeha lives into a tapestry that enriches our sense of what it is to be a New Zealander."[9]
