Dr Jane Mccabe

Biography

2014: PhD, University of Otago 2009: PGDip Arts, University of Otago 2006: BCapSc, University of Otago 1995: BA, University of Otago

Research Interest

Jane researches at the intersection of family, community, culture and intimacy. Her recent monograph Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement (Bloomsbury, 2017) examines the lives of the ‘Kalimpong Kids’: Anglo-Indian youngsters who followed an extraordinary trajectory from tea plantations in northeast India to resettlement in New Zealand via a Scottish mission school in Kalimpong. This book explores their descendants’ fashioning of family narratives from hushed beginnings to journeys to Kalimpong. Jane’s grandmother was one of the emigrants and thus she has brought a personal story into the realm of academic and public history. She continues to engage with the ‘Kalimpong community’. The same spirit of community engagement informs Jane’s current three-year (2017-2020) project, funded by a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fast-start grant. This is a cross-cultural history of land and inheritance on the Taieri and in Hokianga, and explores the way that farming families across different cultures have navigated the complex process of intergenerational land transfer.