Storytelling

Narratives — both factual and fictional — help us to explain events, actions and motivations with a beginning, middle and end. We study the stories of others and create our own.

Our celebrated filmmakers, novelists and poets — such as New Zealand's Poet Laureate, and most lauded documentarian — play with language and raise big issues.

Explore our expertise

We study New Zealand, Pacific, Caribbean, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, Irish, Latin, Latin American, American and English literature. Also: Nabokov.

Explore our expertise

Our interests range from language education to Māori and Pacific educational success to patriotic education, public pedagogy and post-WWII educational theatre.

Explore our expertise

We research popular music, film, video games and comic books — and pop culture subjects like prisons, the Bible and kamikaze pilots — on nearly every continent.

Explore our expertise

Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? We research how and why different cultures and ideologies prefer different styles of art, design, body adornment and life.

Explore our expertise

Associate Professor Aroha Harris (Te Rarawa and Ngāpuhi) uncovers the complexity of Māori histories.

Read more

Poet-scholar Associate Professor Selina Tusitala Marsh explains how making creative work is part of her Indigenous scholarship, as well as her poetry.

Read more

Professor Gary Barkhuizen collects and studies stories, to learn about why and how we teach and learn languages.

Read more

Founded by award-winning novelist and academic Dr Paula Morris, the ANZL includes 15 Fellows and around 100 invited members.

Visit the ANZL

Our historians aim to put the history of Tāmaki Makaurau at the heart of an energetic conversation about our city.

Find out more

We combine macro and micro knowledges — getting down to the nitty-gritty and zooming out for the larger picture — to develop understandings of life.

Focusing on the details

Institutions can empower the vulnerable and/or discriminate and attack. We study collective actions and categories: their causes, effects and resistance.

Critiquing institutions

People make, shape and break physical and political locations — and vice versa. We study kaitiakitanga, disaster recovery, health and migration — old and new.

Exploring places