Dr Rowan Light is a historian of memory and commemoration, interested in public uses of the past, with a special focus on how communities make sense of war and violence. He lectures history at the University of Auckland and is project curator (NZ Wars) at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, assisting the Human History team in the redevelopment of the New Zealand Wars gallery.
His book Anzac Nations (OUP, 2022) is a history of cultural memory that explores how the story of the Anzacs at Gallipoli has changed overtime in Australia and New Zealand. Rowan is interested in how groups and institutions shape the remembrance and commemoration of war and conflict, such as museums. His essay ‘Unknown Anzacs: the politics and performance of bodily repatriation and state formation’ was awarded the Ken Inglis Postgraduate History Prize and published in Australian Historical Studies in 2018. ‘Unknown Anzacs’ explored the connections between nineteenth and twentieth-century histories of violence through a comparative and transnational lens. A series of essays on the politics of memory and history was published as a BWB short text ‘Why Memory Matters’ in 2023 – offering the first study of historical memory in Aotearoa New Zealand that, drawing on local and international memory scholarship, directly addressed Aotearoa New Zealand public audiences.
As part of his interest in histories of memory, he is currently researching the repatriation of Bishop Jean-Baptiste Pompallier by the Hokianga Māori Catholic community from France in 2001.
