UC Arts offers our academics as guest speakers for secondary school visits. Their areas of expertise and knowledge are relevant to subject classes such as art, music, English, media studies, social sciences, social studies, art history, history and more.
The list of speakers below outlines who is available to visit your school, and the topics they can speak on.
Barbara Garrie - Art History and Theory
Barbara Garrie is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History and Theory at UC. She teaches in the fields of modern and contemporary art history and has a specialist research interest in photography, artists’ publishing, and aspects of contemporary art practice in New Zealand.
Barbara can speak about: Canon Formation: Remembering and Forgetting Art’s Histories; Feminist Art Histories: Focus on Linda Nochlin’s ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’; An introduction to Artists’ Books; international contemporary art; New Zealand art history- colonial representations of Aotearoa; regionalism in Canterbury (1930s/1940s); and contemporary New Zealand art.
Chelsea Rapp is the Programme Manger for the Digital Screen Campus.After working in Medtech product development for many years, Chelsea decided to pursue her passion for video games, and in 2019, brought her 10+ years of experience to Aotearoa New Zealand. In addition to her role at the DSC, Chelsea is Chairperson of the New Zealand Game Developer’s Association, the national industry body for games and interactive media.
Chelsea can talk about the Campus, a BDiSc general overview, Industry perspective, and the Game and Film Industry in NZ and beyond.
Adrian Clark is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Immersive Game Design in the School of Product Design. He completed his PhD in Computer Science at the HIT Lab NZ, where he developed a robust natural feature registration framework called OPIRA Optical-flow Perspective Invariant Registration Augmentation.
Adrian can speak about Digital Screen Campus, Bachelor of Digital Screen with Honours general overview and degree format, and detailed insights into Game Development, Game Art, Animation and storytelling.
Donald Matheson - Media and Communication
Associate Professor Donald Matheson is head of the Media and Communication Department at UC. He is an expert on journalism, social media and media ethics.
Donald can speak about: How social media have changed public debate; ethical issues in media such as fake news; hate speech; freedom of speech; bias and ethics for public relations; documentary-making and shaping messages for the audience; citizen journalism and participatory media; how to analyse media language, including narrative, labelling and vocabulary; how to write well for your audience; the future of journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand; war reporting; the use of social media after a disaster.
David Monger is a senior lecturer in the History Department at UC. He teaches about revolution, war, and modern world history, and his research focuses on propaganda and patriotism in First World War Britain.
David can speak about the origins of the First World War, British and European propaganda in the First World War and anti-Semitism in late-19th and early-20th century Britain, as well as the Armenian Genocide.
Gary Morrison is a senior lecturer in the Classics Department at UC.He teaches the Department’s Roman History Courses, as well as Beginner Ancient Greek. His research focuses on Roman Social History, in particular the reality of living in the ancient world.
Gary can speak about:Roman republican history; Roman imperial history; Roman society - including: housing, women, slaves, urban spaces, children, old age, occupations, living costs, etc.; Roman urban spaces at night; Classical influences in forming New Zealand’s WWI memory.
Patrick O'Sullivan an associate Professor in the department of Classics at UC. His teaching focuses on Archaic and Classical Greek intellectual and cultural history.
He can give talks on: Greek mythology (especially epic poetry and Troy), ancient Greek theatre, philosophy (Socrates, et al.), religion and atheism in antiquity, ancient sport (including the Olympic games), and Greek and Roman art.
Dr Tara Ross is a senior lecturer and head of the journalism programme at the University of Canterbury. She was an award-winning senior newpaper reporter and has worked as both a freelance writer and editor. Of Pākehā and Tuvaluan descent, her research centres on journalism, diversity issues, ethnic minorities and Pacific media. She is a research fellow with the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies.
Tara can speak about: journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand; Pacific media; Indigenous and ethnic minority media; global news media; the professional ethics of journalism; post-disaster communication; crime and the media; science journalism.
Dr Nicholas Wright is a lecturer in UC’s English Department. He teaches a host of courses that range across poetry and fiction in the American and New Zealand traditions, but also teaches courses dedicated to the study of the novel and the short story. If there is a particular text or topic you’d like him to address with your class, please indicate this in your request.
