On difficult histories with Avril Bell & Rowan Light

Join Sociologist Avril Bell and Historian Rowan Light for a conversation about the nature of difficult histories in Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing on their respective research practices to consider major historical events including Gallipoli/Çanakkale and the New Zealand Wars, Bell and Light will explore what makes a history ‘difficult’, the importance of understanding them and how they respond to them in their work as tangata Tiriti.

This talk will be held in The University of Auckland Clock Tower Room 032. This conversation will be recorded with a transcript published on Gus Fisher Gallery’s website at a later date.

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Avril Bell is an Honorary Associate Professor in Sociology at Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of Auckland and teaches treaty-based professional development courses for university staff. Her main research interests are in the field of settler colonialism. She has written extensively on what it means to be a Pākehā New Zealander, and on Māori-Pākehā relations and histories. Her book Relating Indigenous and Settler Identities: Beyond Domination (Palgrave, 2014) explores settler colonial logics and dynamics in Australia, Canada, the USA, as well as Aotearoa New Zealand. She is also the author of Becoming Tangata Tiriti (2024, Auckland University Press), based on conversations with twelve non-Māori New Zealanders about their work in support of Māori and te Tiriti o Waitangi. She is currently working on a critical settler family history.

Rowan Light (Pākehā, Ngai te Tiriti) is a historian and Senior Lecturer at Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of Auckland where he teaches Aotearoa New Zealand histories. Since 2021, he has also been project curator at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, researching the New Zealand Wars collection. In 2024, he co-curated Atarau: Stories of the New Zealand Wars with Nigel Borell, with whom he also co-edited a collection of essays under the same title (to be released in October, 2025). His research explores how communities and societies remember and commemorate war and violence, reflected in previous books such as Anzac Nations: The Legacy of Gallipoli in New Zealand and Australia, 1965-2015 (OUP, 2022) and Why Memory Matters: Remembered histories and the politics of the shared past (BWB, 2024). He lives in central Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland with his partner.

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Image: (1) Köken Ergun, Heroes/Şehitler (Martyrs), film still, 2016-18. Courtesy of the artist. (2) Left: Avril Bell, Right: Rown Light.

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