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Staff Profiles

Dr Jen Kain

Lecturer in History

Background

I am a Lecturer in History (mainly of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) with a particular focus on Aotearoa New Zealand. I specialise in the policy and practice of health-related border controls hence my work combines migration, medical, maritime and legal history. 

My first monograph-entitled Insanity and Immigration Control in New Zealand and Australia 1860-1930-was published in November 2019 with Palgrave Macmillan's Mental Health in Historical Perspective series. 

I completed my PhD at Northumbria University in 2015 and my MA in the History of the Americas at Â鶹´«Ã½ in 2010. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Between 2016-2017 I held the Alan Pearsall Junior Fellowship in Maritime History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, for my post-doctoral project 'Seamen as Prohibited Immigrants: Shore leave, sickness, sanity and syphilis'.

In 2018 I was awarded a New Zealand History Research Trust grant to help with the completion of my monograph, which in 2021 was shortlisted for the New Zealand Historical Association's biennial prize in the category 'best first book by an author on any aspect of New Zealand History'. 

In the summer of 2022 I held a Research Fellowship in Global History at the Ludwig-Maximilians -Universität München for my current research project 'Adrift in Medical Transit: Distressed British seamen in limbo, c.1890-1930'.

Between 2023 and 2024 I worked with colleagues from Sheffield University and Keele University on an Independent Social Research Fund financed project .




Research

My research focuses on health-related immigration control in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I am more broadly interested in maritime history, the histories of eugenics, migration, mental illness and the colonial histories of New Zealand and Australia.


I am currently developing an article which deals with early twentieth-century bureaucratic responses to syphilitic merchant seamen in Aotearoa New Zealand, and a further article on the 1901 White Australia Policy in terms of its eugenic health clauses.




Teaching

2025-26 Academic Year


Semester 1: Research Leave


Semester 2:


HIS1103 History Lab II

HIS2095 Social Histories of Alcohol: Britain and Ireland, 1700 - Present 

HIS3036 Public History in Practice

HIS8121 Dealing With Difficult Pasts: International Public Histories



Publications

  • Articles

    • Kain JS. 'A Contagious Floating Population': Public health responses to syphilitic merchant seamen in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1910-1920. 2026. In Preparation.
    • Kain JS. . Journal of World History 2025, 36(3), 469-499.
    • Bright R, Cleall E, Kain JS. . Migration Studies 2025, 13(1).
    • Kain JS. . International Journal of Maritime History 2018, 30(3), 442-457.
    • Kain JS. . Social History of Medicine 2018, 33(3), 843–859.
    • Kain J. . Studies in the Literary Imagination 2016, 48(1), 75-92.

  • Authored Book

    • Kain JS. . Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

  • Online Publications

    • Kain J. . Marlborough: AM Research Methods: Interrogating Colonial Archives and Narratives, 2023.
    • Kain J. Nerve Exhausted but not Insane: Therapeutic Travel for the Over-Taxed Brain Worker. Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth Century Perspectives, University of Oxford, 2016. Available at: https://diseasesofmodernlife.web.ox.ac.uk/article/nerve-exhausted-but-not-insane-therapeutic-travel-for-the-over-taxed-brain-worker.

  • Reviews

    • Kain JS. . Journal of Australian, Canadian, and Aotearoa New Zealand Studies 2025, 5, 145-147.
    • Kain JS. . Health and History 2022, 24(1), 137-139.
    • Kain JS. . Historical Records of Australian Science 2020, 31(1), 64-70.
    • Kain J. . H-ANZAU 2017.
    • Kain J. . Immigrants and Minorities 2014, 32(1), 126-129.