ASI welcomes Professor Giselle Byrnes, the new Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Research, Academic and Enterprise) at Massey University. Professor Byrnes has senior management experience in universities in Australia and in New Zealand and is an internationally recognised historian.
Professor Giselle Byrnes has been the Pro Vice-Chancellor of the Faculty of Law, Education, Business and Arts at Charles Darwin University since 2011. She also held the role of Pro Vice-Chancellor (Community Engagement). Previously she held positions at the University of Waikato as Pro Vice-Chancellor (Postgraduate), Professor of History and Head of the History Programme.
Massey Vice-Chancellor Steve Maharey announced that he was delighted to welcome an academic leader and an experienced university manager of Professor Byrnes' calibre to the University's Senior Leadership Team. "Professor Byrnes has a commitment to advancing the agenda around equity and access, regional and distance education, and is a strong advocate for the critical role of teaching, learning and applied research in creating social, cultural and intellectual capital," Mr Maharey says. "She brings to this role a strong record of academic and strategic leadership, in both the New Zealand and Australasian higher education sectors."
Professor Byrnes grew up in South Canterbury and Bay of Plenty, attended Tauranga Girls' College and completed a Bachelor of Arts in History and English and a Master of Arts in History at the University of Waikato. Her PhD in History is from the University of Auckland. Her thesis is entitled Inventing New Zealand: Surveying, Science and the Construction of Cultural Space 1840s-1890s.
She worked as a senior research officer for the Waitangi Tribunal from 1995 to 1997 and taught at Victoria University of Wellington from 1997 to 2007 in the History Programme in the School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations prior to her appointment to Waikato.
In 2006 she was Fulbright Visiting Professor in New Zealand Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC. She has also served a term as New Zealand Historical Association national president.
She has an international reputation as an historian of colonial encounters and her publications are highly regarded. These include Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and the Colonisation of New Zealand (2001), The Waitangi Tribunal and New Zealand History (2004) and The New Oxford History of New Zealand (2009), of which she was editor. She has published numerous articles on various aspects of colonial, settler and Indigenous histories, in addition to public history.
Source: Massey University Website
