Alumni couple help fund next top historians

Political journalist Norman Cousins once said: “History is a vast early warning system.” Historian Dr Felicity Barnes would agree with that and hopes to help more academics shed light on the present.

Dr Felicity Barnes and her husband Michael Whitehead.
Dr Felicity Barnes and her husband Michael Whitehead.

Dr Felicity Barnes says she was the kid picked last for school sports teams. “If I was playing netball and you threw the ball at me, it would likely smack me in the head,” she laughs.

Now, in the Faculty of Arts where she is a senior lecturer in New Zealand history, she’d very much be considered a good sport and certainly a team player.

Felicity and husband Michael Whitehead have gifted $500,000 to set up the Barnes Whitehead History Innovation Fund, aimed at improving the research outputs of the University’s history department, especially for New Zealand history.

The fund will start by paying for a postdoctoral fellow in New Zealand history for 2021.

Felicity has taught at her alma mater, the University of Auckland, since 2012. The former Avondale College student had started out mixing science and arts before settling on English and History to complete her BA. She then worked outside academia, returning to complete a Diploma in Management at the Business School, before completing her PhD in history.

Michael, who did a BCom at Auckland in management studies and computer science, went on to co-found global software company WhereScape and New Zealand services firm Now Consulting. A Prime Minister’s business scholarship winner, he has also been a category winner in the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards, and WhereScape was the supreme winner at the 2016 NZ International Business Awards. He sold two of his companies in 2019.

“The sale is the background to the gift,” says Felicity. “It was around that time we decided to think about the whole idea of philanthropy and giving back. We have other work to do, but the first thing that came to mind was to support learning. We’re aware that we’re both products of the old-fashioned free education system.”

Felicity had taken time off teaching in 2019, and part of that was spent doing research.

“Because I work in the history department, I understand where a bit of money might make a lot of difference in boosting research,” she says.

“That’s really what we’re hoping the fund will help – supporting great research outputs – and that also aligns with the University’s goals.”

Our history is still being written. That provides huge scope for research.

Dr Felicity Barnes, lecturer in history, Faculty of Arts University of Auckland

The gift was a joint decision. “In a long-term relationship, it’s what you both put in. Michael’s international business meant he was away a lot and we’ve worked around it, raising two daughters for 20 years,” says Felicity. “He’d be the first to say it’s been a mutual effort.”

Felicity says as well as this funding to her pet subject, Michael gives in other areas.

“He gives a lot of time to IT start-ups through his organisation Tap-In Ventures, and works with some companies pro bono to get them on track.”

She says he’s also been a great support to her while she’s been researching or writing books.

“It’s fair to say this gift to fund history was an initiative I was particularly enthusiastic about and he just gladly joined in with it.”

Michael says there was good reason.

“Having spent years as an employer, the thing we most looked for in employees was the ability to problem-solve and communicate. So, while it may look counter-intuitive for me to back the arts, actually they’re directly relevant to the kinds of things I think will make New Zealand, and New Zealand business, better.”

Felicity says the goal is to fund five postdoctoral fellows for one academic year each as well as allow academics to get on with research by paying students to help with marking.

“Research is affected when you’re juggling the workload, so someone who could be writing a paper is marking stage-one essays. Let’s get them back to producing research. That’s my thinking.”

Felicity says one of the research areas close to her heart is New Zealand history.

“There is so much more to learn about it. For example, there’s terrific new work on the New Zealand Wars. Our history is still being written – it’s nowhere near complete – and that provides huge scope for research.

“Many of the best-known historians had the luxury of time to do their research and the result has included books that are essential reading. So, hopefully our fund can help with this a little.”

She says New Zealand has a wealth of accessible historians. She was taught by the likes of Keith Sinclair and James Belich.

“New Zealand is extremely fortunate in the quality of its historians, and they’re high-calibre writers. Even though the Sinclair and Belich books are older now, those general histories are terrific reads. As are Vincent O’Malley’s 2016 landmark book The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800-2000 and Dancing with the King: The Rise and Fall of the King Country, 1864-1885 by Michael Belgrave. They’re accessible, lively and full of ideas.”

Her own book was released in 2012. New Zealand’s London: A Colony and Its Metropolis (AUP) was based on her doctoral thesis, which had won the University’s best doctoral dissertation.

We’ve heard from scientists about Covid-19 but few historians.

Dr Felicity Barnes

Although New Zealand has always had more prominent male historians than female, Felicity points to some change.

“As far as general histories, there’s Philippa Mein Smith’s A Concise History of New Zealand and Giselle Byrnes edited the New Oxford History of New Zealand, which collected together some very innovative essays on our past. And there’s Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History, in which two of the three co-authors are women, Aroha Harris and Judith Binney. If you’re interested in the history of New Zealand, it’s a must-read.”

When she and Michael had children, study seemed like a good alternative to full-time work, so she began her masters.

“I thought I was just going to do my masters and when the kids got older, I’d go back to work. I tried to do contract work, but it was too hard to juggle young children and meetings. I thought, if I could do anything in the world now what would I do? The one thing I wanted to do was read. And learn.”

When she won a doctoral scholarship, she never looked back.

“What the scholarship told me was ‘we’ve got faith that you’ll do a good job’. When you’re studying with twentysomethings who are focused and determined, you kind of think ‘am I in the right place’? You have self-doubt. The scholarship helped me overcome that.”

Felicity would like to raise the profile of historians and says Covid-19 is a good opportunity.

“We’ve heard from scientists about Covid-19 but few historians. Chief historian Neill Atkinson and people like Linda Bryder and Charlotte Bennett can tell us a lot about past pandemics. For example, how did people deal with the impact of the ’flu pandemic in 1918? We can learn a lot from how humans behaved in similar circumstances in the past.”

She also highlights how ideas about teaching history have changed, from remembering significant dates to exploring stories.

“The old-fashioned way of teaching history was that it was a memory game. You were good at history if you could recall the order in which the kings ruled. If that’s what makes a good historian, I’m a terrible historian!

“For me, it’s about questioning. History isn’t about dates so much as telling stories that enlighten us as to how people lived their lives in the past. People would be a lot more interested if they thought about history not so much as a series of facts but a series of stories to interpret, understand and shed light. That sparks curiosity.”

She says the Covid-19 pandemic may have one silver lining. “It has given us a greater sense of empathy and insight into the way events like war completely disestablished people’s lives.
“I’m thinking about my kids who are in their twenties and trying to transition study and work and suddenly there’s this global catastrophe.

“When we look at events such as WWII, we sometimes forget people put their lives on hold for five or more years! So when I read stories of people saying ‘it’s so hard, our family can’t just jump on a plane and see each other’, I think about the people through the ages who went to war or migrated with no real prospect of returning. It’s our version of that past and it makes me understand it more.

“There is a tendency for us to treat people in the past as somewhat lesser beings. They call it the condescension of posterity. ‘People foolishly thought this in the past.’ Well, now we really get a sense of how a disaster affects lives, don’t we?”
 

Denise Montgomery

This feature article first appeared in the Spring 2020 edition of alumni magazine Ingenio