|
Profile
Rachel Barrowman is a leading independent historian and biographer. In 2008 she was awarded the Creative New Zealand Michael King Writers’ Fellowship to write a major biography of leading New Zealand writer Maurice Gee.
Selected published works
A Popular Vision: The Arts and the Left in New Zealand 1930-1950, 1991; Victoria University of Wellington 1899-1999: A History, 1999; The Turnbull: A Library and its World, 1995; Mason: The Life of R. A. K. Mason, 2003.
Publishers
Auckland University Press
www.auckland.ac.nz/aup
Victoria University Press
www.vuw.ac.nz/vup
Biography
Rachel Barrowman was born in 1963 in Wellington where she lives. She was educated at Wellington Girls’ College and Victoria University of Wellington, graduating with an MA with Distinction in History in 1987. Between 1988 and 1993 she worked as an editor for The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. She was awarded the National Library Research Fellowship in 1993 to work on the history of state arts funding in New Zealand. She has subsequently worked as a contract historian and a freelance editor.
Her first book, A Popular Vision: The Arts and the Left in New Zealand 1930-1950 (1991), looks at the influence of the left in New Zealand literary culture in a period usually associated in this country’s literary historiography with the rise of cultural nationalism. This ground-breaking study examines the influence of Tomorrow magazine and details the activities of the Left Book Club, left-wing theatres, book shops and publishing, locating this left-wing cultural movement within both theoretical and international contexts, and showing how it was closely related to cultural nationalism.
The Turnbull: A Library and its World (1995) celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Alexander Turnbull library in Wellington. The library was made possible by the generosity of merchant and bibliophile Alexander Turnbull, whose bequest of his private collection to the nation comprised some 55,000 books, as well as prints, paintings, manuscripts, maps and drawings. In a review, Rachel Salmon described the book as an ‘excellent history ... Barrowman's focus is on why collections are in the Library rather than is what is in them’. W.J. McEldowney noted it was ‘a fascinating account of the development of the collections and the way in which they have been used by researchers and more general inquirers’.
Between 1996 and 1999 Barrowman was based at the Stout Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington writing a centennial history of the university. Victoria University of Wellington 1899-1999: A History (1999) is an intellectual and cultural history of the university. It focuses on the evolution of its strengths and contributions to scholarship and knowledge in both local and international contexts. It is also a social history, telling the story of its students and of its changing relationship with its city.
In 2000, Barrowman was awarded the J.D. Stout Research Fellowship to work on a biography of the poet R.A.K Mason. In 2004 Mason: The Life of R. A. K. Mason won the biography category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Bill Manhire commented: ‘This wonderful, scrupulous book at last explains the writer who produced New Zealand’s first great poems as well as the damaged, courageous man who lost his gift.’ In a review for the Listener, Kevin Ireland wrote, ‘Barrowman’s triumph has been not just to explore the mysteries of a life that she describes as following “a pattern of missed opportunities … perhaps wilfully missed”, but to provide us, incidentally, with a stunning account of four decades of New Zealand literary, social and political history’. |
