Emma studied Law and History at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Before coming to Oxford she was a Junior Barrister at Thorndon Chambers where she provided legal advice and advocacy across a broad range of civil and commercial law. She has contributed chapters to leading texts on feminist legal theory and the history of eugenics, and reviews books for New Zealand’s foremost literary journal, Landfall. A multilingual scholar with English, fluent French and basic proficiency in Mandarin, she now wishes to return to her first love, History.
She is currently researching forgotten ‘insider’ and revisionist anthropology at Oxford, exploring the underacknowledged contribution of Makereti, a female Māori scholar, to the disciplines of anthropology and ethnography through her research and writing in 1920s Oxford. More broadly, her work looks at Māori agency in the production of Pākehā (European) knowledge.