Researcher Summary
Paul Millar is a Professor of English Literature and Digital Humanities in the School of Humanities and Creative Arts. His research interests include the literature of Aotearoa New Zealand, Life Writing, and Cultural Heritage Digital Archiving. His literary biography of novelist and cultural commentator Bill Pearson was a finalist in the New Zealand Book Awards, and he is currently writing the biography of influential poet, philanthropist and editor, Charles Brasch. Millar has been involved in Digital Humanities projects and research since 1996. In 2001 he co-founded Victoria University of Wellington’s New Zealand Electronic Text Collection, and at UC he led the establishment of New Zealand's first Digital Humanities teaching programme. Following the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes he founded the CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive (www.ceismic.org.nz), a cultural heritage database that collects stories, images and media about the earthquakes' impacts for the purposes of commemoration, teaching and research. His current Marsden-funded project, ‘Kōrero mai. Tell us your earthquake story’ is a longitudinal study of post-disaster narratives that seeks to better understand how retellings of dramatic experience years later crystallize narrative structure, provide multi-faceted perspectives of people’s experiences of recovery, and reveal more of how narratives of traumatic events change over time. Millar is president of the Australasian Association of Digital Humanities (aaDH) and co-director of the UC Arts Digital Lab.
