Professor Tony Ballantyne
Deputy Vice-Chancellor (External Engagement), University of Otago
Tony is recognised as a world-leading historian of the modern British empire. He has worked extensively on the development of colonial knowledge, changing understandings of language, religion and race, and the uneven “webs” of exchange and connection that gave the empire shape.
His current research primarily focuses on the development of colonial knowledge in southern New Zealand, a long-running project that was originally supported by a grant from the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He is currently working on a set of related monographs on this material, including a study of the collector and historian Herries Beattie.
Tony has often worked collaboratively. He has a long-standing collaboration with Antoinette Burton from the University of Illinois. Their most recent works are Empires and The Reach of the Global, 1870-1945, published by Harvard University Press; and a co-edited volume entitled World Histories From Below: Dissent and Disruption with Bloomsbury Press, which is into its second expanded edition.
He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2012 and in 2016 won its Humanities Aronui Medal for sustained innovation in Humanities research.