Rate My Professor Violeta Gilabert

Dr. Violeta Gilabert serves as a Teaching Fellow in the History Programme, School of Arts, at the University of Otago, where she is recognized as an early career researcher affiliated with the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture. Her primary research interests encompass histories of emotion, gender, and settler-colonialism in New Zealand and the South Pacific. Specializing in the social history of emotion, with a focus on settler-colonialism, class, and gender in Aotearoa New Zealand, Gilabert examines themes of coupledom, sexuality, and family in cross-cultural perspective. She completed her Doctor of Philosophy in History at the University of Otago in 2020, with a thesis titled Labours of Love: Marriage and Emotion in Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1918-1970s. This work, supervised by Angela Wanhalla and Mark Seymour, was supported by the Royal Society Te Apārangi Doctoral Scholarship from 2016 to 2020. The thesis is deposited in the University of Otago's Our Archive repository.

Gilabert held the inaugural Barnes-Whitehead History Innovation Fund Postdoctoral Fellowship based at the University of Auckland, alongside serving as an adjunct in Otago's Department of History and Art History. She received the James Clark Prize in History in May 2016. Her scholarly output includes book reviews such as The Christchurch Civic Crèche Case by Lynley Hood in the New Zealand Journal of History, Volume 55, Number 1 (April 2021), and Benjamin Kingsbury's The Dark Island: Leprosy in New Zealand and the Quail Island Colony in Social History of Medicine (2020). Additionally, she contributed a select bibliography on Women, Work and Care to Past Caring? Women, Work, and Emotion (2019). Gilabert has participated in academic events, including organizing the Making Women Visible conference supported by CRoCC and discussions on suffrage events 125 years on at Otago. She provided research assistance for the history section of Modern Italy journal's quarter-century retrospective (2020). Currently, she is preparing material from her doctoral thesis for publication. Her broader interests include the history of New Zealand, the British Empire, anthropology of Christianity, New Zealand studies, and British imperialism.