Welcoming Hamish McDougall, Fulbright Scholar

CANZPS welcomes Dr. Hamish McDougall as a visiting scholar. McDougall won the Fulbright New Zealand Scholar Award, announced on 28 May 2026, which brings him to Georgetown to write a history of nuclear-free New Zealand. The subject sits close to the Center’s own interests, since the nuclear question shaped the New Zealand relationship with the United States for a generation and still informs how Wellington manages its alliance commitments. He comes to Washington from Auckland, where he is a non-resident fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies at Victoria University of Wellington and a research associate at the Public Policy Institute at the University of Auckland.

McDougall is an international historian of the Cold War, decolonization, and trade. He earned his doctorate in international history at the London School of Economics with a thesis on British and New Zealand relations and European integration, which won the Michael Dockrill Prize for the best international history thesis at a British university. Palgrave Macmillan published it in 2023 as New Zealand, Britain, and European Integration Since 1960: Staying Alive. He also designed and taught courses in twentieth-century international history at LSE, and he has written a chapter in the official history of the New Zealand foreign service along with articles on the 1971 European Community accession negotiations and the international dimensions of the 1981 Springbok Tour. He served as Executive Director of the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs from 2022 – 2025, and before that he spent fifteen years in corporate and marketing communications, where he led the launch communications for He Tohu, the National Library of New Zealand’s exhibition of the country’s founding documents, which won the PRINZ Supreme Award in 2018.