NZ art and culture to Georgetown University

14 September 2007 MEDIA RELEASE

Visiting Lecturers take New Zealand art and culture to Georgetown University

Students at Georgetown University’s Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies in Washington, DC, will be introduced to New Zealand art, film and literature by two leading academics next year. Dr Jo Diamond from Christchurch and Dr Brian McDonnell from Auckland have been appointed as Fulbright Visiting Lecturers in New Zealand Studies for 2008.

Each will teach for one semester in their field of speciality, and make the most of the university’s renowned library collections for their own research purposes. Dr Jo Diamond, a lecturer in Art History at the University of Canterbury, will teach a course in indigenous art history during Georgetown University’s Spring 2008 semester from January to May. Her twelve week course will include an overview of Mäori art spanning from the initial settlement of New Zealand through European colonisation to the modern day, with the classes culminating in a hākari (shared feast) in keeping with Mäori cultural practices.

Dr Diamond is one of New Zealand’s foremost historians of Mäori visual arts and culture. Along with Peter Shaw, she was co-curator of Te Huringa/Turning Points: Päkehä Colonisation & Mäori Empowerment, a touring exhibition of paintings from the collections of The Fletcher

Trust and Wanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery, which is currently showing at the City Gallery in Wellington. While based at Georgetown, Dr Diamond will take the opportunity to research pedagogical theories and practices in relation to teaching Mäori subjects outside New Zealand, which will contribute to a book she is writing on the topic as well as enhancing her own teaching practise back home.

Dr Brian McDonnell, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Massey University, will teach a course in New Zealand film and literature during Georgetown’s Fall 2008 semester from August to December. His course will investigate ways in which New Zealand and New Zealanders have been imagined in films, poems and novels.

An expert on American film noir as well as New Zealand cinema, Dr McDonnell recently co-authored the Encyclopedia of Film Noir with Australian counterpart Geoff Mayer from La Trobe University in Melbourne. He plans to continue researching the genre at Georgetown University, towards another book on the topic.

ENDS

© Scoop Media