Kate Stevens is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her research focuses on histories of cultural, environmental and economic exchange in the colonial and postcolonial Pacific. Her first book Gender, Violence and Criminal Justice in the Colonial Pacific 1880-1920 examines sexual violence across different colonial legal systems. Her other projects explore multispecies and environmental histories of the Pacific, including women’s roles in whaling worlds, coconut oil from the Pacific to the global economy and urban histories of Suva.

Shipworm modernity: marine borer dis:connecting ports and oceans from the 19^th century to the present

This project traces shifting human relationships to the multispecies assemblage of shipworm and wood in the Pacific Ocean, considering their role in making, unmaking and remaking coastlines and sea. Shipworms were emblematic of the tensions between connection and disconnection in the ocean in the colonial and postcolonial era, as they moved with ships at the same time as disrupting shipping infrastructure. I examine indigenous understandings of shipworm, sometimes valued and farmed for food, alongside colonial anxieties over their threats to oceanic connectivity.