Staff Profiles

I am an early career researcher 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 Newcastle University 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 Eugenics, the British Empire, and the creation of the global migration system.

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 book chapter on the 1901 White Australia Policy in terms of its health clauses.

2024-25 Academic Year

HIS3359 Nineteenth Century Aotearoa New Zealand: Maori, Pakeha and Tauiwi * Module Leader*

HIS3020 Writing History * Module Leader*

HIS8020 Missions, Missionaries and Empires in World History: British, European and Informal Empires

• Articles

  • Bright R, Cleall E, Kain JS. Reconsidering the history of eugenics and discrimination in migration control. Migration Studies 2025, 13(1), mnaf002.
  • Kain JS. 'A Contagious Floating Population': Public health responses to syphilitic merchant seamen in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1910-1920. 2025. In Preparation.
  • Kain JS. Traversing Multiple Sites of Transit: Repatriating Mentally Distressed British Seamen, 1925-1930. Journal of World History 2025, 36(3). In Press.
  • Kain JS. Undesirable merchant seamen in transit: Harold Shaw, the Antarctic and the asylum. International Journal of Maritime History 2018, 30(3), 442-457.
  • Kain JS. Standardising Defence Lines: William Perrin Norris, Eugenics and Australian Border Control. Social History of Medicine 2018, 33(3), 843–859.
  • Kain J. The Ne’er-do-well: Representing the Dysfunctional Migrant Mind, New Zealand 1850–1910. Studies in the Literary Imagination 2016, 48(1), 75-92.

• Authored Book

  • Kain JS. Insanity and Immigration Control in New Zealand and Australia, 1860-1930. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

• Online Publications

  • Kain J. Using correspondence between colonial governments and land-stock companies to understand how land grants facilitated colonisation. 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. Medicalising Borders: Selection, Containment and Quarantine since 1800 edited. by Sevasti Trubeta, Christian Promitzer, and Paul Weindling [book review]. Health and History 2022, 24(1), 137-139.
  • Kain JS. Eugenics at the Edge of Empire: New Zealand, Australia, Canada and New Zealand edited by Diane B. Paul, John Stenhouse and Hamish G. Spencer [Book review]. Historical Records of Australian Science 2020, 31(1), 64-70.
  • Kain J. New Zealand's Empire edited by Katie Pickles and Catharine Coleborne [book review]. H-ANZAU 2017.
  • Kain J. Health, Medicine and the Sea: Australian Voyages c.1815–1860, by Katherine Foxhall [book review]. Immigrants and Minorities 2014, 32(1), 126-129.