Rate My Professor Miranda Johnson

Miranda Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Otago, where she serves as Postgraduate Co-ordinator for MA and PhD programmes. She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago (2008), an MA from the University of Auckland (2003), and a BA (Hons) from Victoria University of Wellington (2000). Her career includes a tenure-track professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a senior lectureship at the University of Sydney (with an ongoing research affiliation), and a postdoctoral fellowship with the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. Johnson is President of the New Zealand Historical Association. She serves as section editor for Australasia and Pacific in History Compass and as a member of the international editorial board of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.

Johnson's research specializes in colonialism and decolonisation, with a focus on settler identity, race, indigeneity, citizenship, and the politics of history-writing in Anglophone settler societies of the South Pacific and North America. Her book The Land is Our History: Indigeneity, Law and the Settler State (Oxford University Press, 2016) received the W. K. Hancock Prize from the Australian Historical Association in 2018. Notable publications include Reconciliation, Indigeneity, and Postcolonial Nationhood in Settler States (Postcolonial Studies, 2011), Making History Public: Indigenous Claims to Settler States (Public Culture, 2008), and History and Colonisation in The Routledge International Handbook of Island Studies (2018). She is completing Redemptive Visions: Problems in History and Culture in a Southern Settler State, which examines biculturalism and changing historical consciousness in Aotearoa New Zealand. Current projects include collating a collection of nineteenth-century Māori petitions to colonial governments, funded by a University of Otago Research Grant, and research on frontier conflict and moral meaning in settler societies' history-writing. Johnson teaches courses including HIST 347: Empires Strike Back: A Global History of Decolonization and HIST 452: Rethinking History, and supervises postgraduate research on race, indigeneity, and settler colonialism in Pacific, Australian, New Zealand, and North American contexts.