Rate My Professor Paerau Warbrick

Associate Professor Paerau Warbrick serves as a senior lecturer in Te Tumu: School of Māori, Pacific and Indigenous Studies at the University of Otago. He holds a BA, PGDipArts, MA, LLB, DipGrad, and PhD from the University of Otago, with his doctoral thesis, completed in 2010, titled 'Māori Land Court 1960-1980: an autoethnographic and social commentary.' Qualified as a Barrister and Solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand and a Legal Practitioner of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, he has practiced as a barrister since November 2000. His legal expertise encompasses Māori land law, trusts, wills, probate, and administration. Warbrick has appeared in the Māori Land Court and Māori Appellate Court and acts as the principal legal adviser to the lawyers at the Ngāi Tahu Māori Law Centre in Dunedin. His legal mentor was the late Robin Corcoran. Of Ngāti Awa principal iwi affiliation, with whakapapa ties to Ngāti Pahipoto, Warahoe, Ngāi Taiwhakaea, Te Arawa (Tuhourangi and Ngāti Rangitihi), Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Maniapoto, Whakatōhea, Whānau-a-Apanui, Tūhoe, and Ngāti Porou, he brings deep cultural insights to his work.

Warbrick's research specializations include Māori history, politics, and law, the Treaty of Waitangi, and Māori elections particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He teaches MAOR 204: Te Tiriti o Waitangi, MAOR 304: Te Rōpū Whakamana i te Tiriti - Waitangi Tribunal, and MAOR 404: Toitū te Whenua - Land, Lore and Colonialism. As Chair of the Undergraduate Committee and Program Coordinator for Indigenous Studies, he contributes significantly to curriculum development and student programs. Key publications feature 'The super-narrative effect. The resonance of written letters for whānau in the historical record' in the Journal of New Zealand Studies (2023), guest editing the special issue 'He Tuhinga Tuku Iho: Texts, contexts, resonances' of the Journal of New Zealand Studies (2023, with Lachy Paterson), a review of 'The Fate of the Land: Māori Political Struggle in the Liberal Era, 1891-1912' in the New Zealand Journal of History (2024), and a review titled 'A Trojan Horse' of 'The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi' in Landfall Review Online (2023). Additionally, he discussed 'Treaty of Waitangi and co-governance' on Otago Access Radio in 2023.