Rate My Professor Barbara Brookes

Emeritus Professor Barbara Brookes is a distinguished historian at the University of Otago, where she served in the Department of History for over 35 years until her retirement in mid-2020. She commenced her academic journey at Otago with a BA (Hons) in History in 1976. Securing a scholarship, she pursued postgraduate studies at Bryn Mawr College in the United States, earning an MA in Modern History in 1978 and a PhD in the same field in 1982, with her dissertation focusing on abortion in England during the inter-war period. Returning to New Zealand, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at Otago before being appointed a full-time lecturer in the Department of History in 1983. In 1986, alongside Dr. Dorothy Page, she pioneered the country's first women's history course. Brookes advanced to Head of the amalgamated Department of History and Art History in 2004, leading it for more than eight years. She also collaborated with Professor Charlotte Paul to establish medical humanities electives in 1996 through a Centre for Academic Learning and Teaching grant. Her contributions extend to the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture (CROCC), where she is an Emerita Professor.

Professor Brookes' scholarship centers on the intersections of women's history and the history of medicine, encompassing gender relations in New Zealand and the history of health and disease in both New Zealand and Britain. Among her seminal works is A History of New Zealand Women (Bridget Williams Books, 2016), which received the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Award in the Illustrated Non-Fiction category. Her first monograph, Abortion in England 1900-1967 (1988; republished by Routledge in 2013), remains influential. She co-edited two collections on New Zealand women's history with Charlotte Macdonald and Margaret Tennant, edited six additional volumes—including Bodily Subjects: Histories of Gender and Health (McGill-Queens University Press, 2014, with Tracy Penny Light and Wendy Mitchinson)—and authored numerous articles, such as "Papering over madness: Accountability and resistance in colonial asylum files: A New Zealand case study" (Rethinking History, 2018). Brookes serves as co-editor of the New Zealand Journal of History and sits on the editorial boards of Women's History Review, Health and History, and Journal of Family History. In recognition of her impact, she was appointed Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) in 2018 for services to historical research and women, and awarded the Royal Society Te Apārangi Humanities Aronui Medal in 2018 for outstanding contributions to humanities scholarship.