JOHN DUNMORE
Professor Emeritus John Dunmore is highly esteemed and widely recognised as a leading scholar of Pacific history, and as the outstanding authority on French exploration of the Pacific, notably the eighteenth-century voyages. His scholarly publications relating to the Pacific total twenty-five books (of which seventeen have been published since his retirement from Massey University in 1984), fourteen chapters in books and fifteen journal articles. This remarkable achievement shows his enduring commitment to work he began as a doctoral student in 1957 under the direction of Professor John Beaglehole at Victoria University, at a time when New Zealand and Pacific history were just becoming accepted as new fields of academic research and teaching.
While Professor Dunmore is noted for his studies of French explorers, editions of their journals and biographies of their lives, his publications also include drama, political writing (a life of Norman Kirk), study manuals, book reviews, and, under a pseudonym, political thrillers. In 1980 he founded the New Zealand Journal of French Studies, and during his teaching career at Massey University (1961-1984), he contributed substantially, as Dean of Humanities (1968-81), to the establishment of teaching and research in Humanities disciplines and to the development of language learning. His work for the Alliances Francaises, both within the New Zealand Federation, of which he was President (1979-1998), and in the regions, has also been sustained, and he was promoted to Officier in the Legion d'Honneur by the French Government in 2007. Professor Dunmore has a lifetime, therefore, of commitment to humanities scholarship and achievement.