Erik Olssen

Erik Newland Olssen is a New Zealand historian whose research focuses on the linkages between social structures, politics, and the world of ideas at four spatial domains – the local, provincial, national and global. In the first third of his academic career, most of Olssen's research examined labour history, especially the working-class mobilisation in New Zealand from 1880 to 1940. He has published several articles and monographs, including a biography of John A. Lee, a social history of New Zealand from 1880 to 1940, a study of revolutionary industrial unionism and the wave of unrest in the years before World War I, and a history of Otago. An interest in the industrial and political mobilisations of sections of the working class led Olssen, between 1974 and 1976, to plan a comparative study of occupational and geographical social mobility in his home suburb of Caversham, regarded as one of the most industrialised areas of New Zealand at that time. Olssen was an academic in the Department of History at the University of Otago from 1969 until his retirement in 2002, when he was conferred with the title of emeritus professor.