Join us for the first Excellence Series event 2025. This series highlights leadership across diverse disciplines while providing a platform to showcase the University's distinctive and influential applied research. It celebrates research excellence and fosters public engagement, extending Lincoln University's specialist land-based expertise to a wider audience, driving New Zealand's prosperity and intergenerational well-being.
European settlement of New Zealand during the mid-nineteenth century had a strong emphasis on the superior quality of rural life in contrast to the apparent ills of the city. In turn this reinforced a belief that sporting success, and especially rugby victories, were due to men who had been trained and toughened by their experiences taming the land. But this interpretation is more mythical than real and has created problems when trying to understand the causes and consequences of significant changes in New Zealand sport and (rural) society more generally – especially in the wake of both neoliberal economic restructuring from the 1980s and the professionalisation and corporatisation of rugby from the 1990s.
This talk draws on three decades of research on the social history of sport and alcohol, and sometimes the links between the two, to explore the pervasive ‘rural myth’ in New Zealand, the role that it has played in (mis)informing public debate, and why understanding history is important to navigating our present and future.
Tuesday 11 March
4.00pm-5.30pm
Pātiki Room, Waimarie, Lincoln University
Timings
4.00 pm - Networking and drinks
4.15 pm - Welcome & introduction from LU Vice-Chancellor
4.20 pm - Presentation from Speaker
4.50 pm - Summary
5.00 pm - Networking and questions over drinks and nibbles
5.30pm - Event Ends
About Our Speaker
Professor Greg Ryan
I have strong national and international research involvement in the sub-disciplines of sports history and the social history of alcohol in New Zealand. My work challenges historians who interpret both sport and alcohol through preconceived historiographical lenses such as masculinity or nationalism, without displaying a nuanced understanding of competing explanations and international contexts. I am recognised as a leader in advancing the discipline of sports history in New Zealand and am now developing a similar niche within the history of alcohol. My work is grounded in substantial archival research in New Zealand and overseas and immersion in relevant comparative historiography. I am the Managing Editor of The International Journal of the History of Sport and on the editorial boards, and review for, other leading international journals in my field. I have been acknowledged through awards and media invitations as a leading historian of sport in New Zealand. In late 2023 I published a major history of beer and brewing in New Zealand. Prior to that, with a co-author, I published the first substantial (160,000 words) academic social history of sport in New Zealand. I am a Fellow of the Australian Society for Sports History.
Research profile Greg Ryan
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