Rate My Professor Erik Olssen

Erik Olssen is Emeritus Professor in the Department of History at the University of Otago. Holding a PhD from Duke University, he is an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM), Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi (FRSNZ), and Fellow of the New Zealand Academy of the Humanities (FNZAH). Olssen graduated from the University of Otago in 1965 and joined its History Department as a lecturer in 1969. He was promoted to associate professor in 1978 and to professor in 1984, serving as Head of Department from 1989 to 1993 and again from 2000 to 2002. He retired in 2002, becoming Emeritus Professor. Throughout his career, he held prestigious fellowships including James Cook Research Fellow in 2001 and Distinguished Fulbright Fellow in 2004. Olssen contributed to numerous committees, such as the Advisory Committee for the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (1983–1996), the Social Science Advisory Committee of the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (1997–2000), and chaired the Humanities Peer Review Panel for the Performance Based Research Fund in 2003.

Olssen's research centers on the relationships between politics, society, ideas, culture, and economics, particularly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New Zealand and Otago history, with major emphasis on labour history and social history since the late 1970s. He initiated and directed the Caversham Project in the mid-1970s, a comprehensive study of Dunedin’s working-class suburb of Caversham. This project progressed through phases examining urban society and opportunity structures, gender dynamics (resulting in Sites of Gender, edited 2003), and marital, inter-generational, and worklife mobility (An Accidental Utopia? Social Mobility and the Foundations of an Egalitarian Society, 2011, co-authored). His influential publications include John A. Lee (1977, second place Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Award); A History of Otago (1983); The Red Feds: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism and the New Zealand Federation of Labour 1908–14 (1988); Building the New World: Work, Politics and Society in Caversham 1880s–1920s (1995, J.E. Sherrard Prize 1996); Working Lives c.1900: A Photographic Essay (2014); and The Origins of an Experimental Society: New Zealand 1769-1860 (2025). He delivered the keynote address 'The significance of human differences: Race and culture as concepts for understanding the diverse peoples of the Pacific, 1750-1914' at the 21st New Zealand Studies Association Conference in 2015. Olssen's work has profoundly shaped understandings of New Zealand's social structures and egalitarian foundations, recognized by awards like the Te Rangi Hiroa Medal (2001) and the naming of the Erik Olssen Prize by the New Zealand Historical Association in 2019.