Rate My Professor Jacqueline Leckie

Associate Professor Jacqueline Leckie serves as Conjoint Associate Professor in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Science, College of Human and Social Futures, at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She holds concurrent positions as Adjunct Research Fellow at the Stout Centre for New Zealand Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, and Fellow of the New Zealand Indian Studies Research Institute. An accomplished historian and anthropologist, Leckie taught for 27 years at the University of Otago, including five years as Head of the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology. Prior to that, she taught history at the University of the South Pacific and Kenyatta University in Kenya. Throughout her career, she has undertaken extensive postgraduate supervision and examination, and played a leading role in multidisciplinary research networks spanning Asian studies, Pacific studies, migration, and health. Her research focuses on health history, migration and diaspora, ethnicity, identity, and gender, particularly subaltern, neglected, and silenced histories in the Asia-Pacific region.

Leckie has authored several influential books, including Old Black Cloud: A Cultural History of Mental Depression in Aotearoa (2024, Massey University Press), Invisible: New Zealand’s History of Excluding Kiwi-Indians (2021, Massey University Press), Colonizing Madness: Asylum and Community in Fiji (2020, University of Hawaii Press), Indian Settlers: The Story of a New Zealand South Asian Community (2007, Otago University Press), To Labour with the State: The Fiji Public Service Association (1997, Otago University Press), and A University for the Pacific: 50 Years of USP (2018, University of the South Pacific). She has contributed key chapters to edited volumes such as ‘Pacific Bodies and Personal Space Redefined, 1850-1950’ in The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean (2022, Cambridge University Press), ‘White Man’s Kava’ in Alcohol, Psychiatry and Society (2022, Manchester University Press), and ‘Inaugural Brij Lal Memorial Lecture: Belonging, and Banishment from and in the Sea of Islands’ in The Journal of Pacific History (2024). As co-editor of The Journal of Pacific History, she has advanced scholarship in Pacific studies. Her honors include life membership of the Pacific History Association, the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship (2024), Friends of the Turnbull Library award (2023), J.D. Stout Research Fellowship (2018), and honorary membership of the New Zealand Indian Central Association. Leckie’s work has significantly illuminated marginalized narratives in colonial and contemporary Pacific contexts.