Dr Cheryl Ware is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Humanities with expertise in oral history, and histories of sex, gender, and health in the late twentieth century Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. She was awarded a Marsden Fund Fast-Start grant for her current project on histories of sex work from 1978 to 2008.

Cheryl is the author of HIV Survivors in Sydney: Memories of the Epidemic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), which engages with original oral history interviews to explore the intimate lives and memories of gay men who were diagnosed with HIV before the introduction of antiretroviral medication in 1996. It examines the diverse ways HIV-positive gay men dealt with the virus both within and outside of established support networks, and how they remember and articulate these experiences nearly three decades later.

Her research has been widely published in New Zealand and international journals, including Women’s History Review, Australian Historical Studies, Journal of Australian Studies, Oral History, Health and History, Oral History in New Zealand, and the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology.

She was awarded a Kate Edger Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in 2018 for her project on sex workers’ responses to HIV and AIDS. Her resulting article was shortlisted for the New Zealand Historical Association’s Mary Boyd prize for the best article on any aspect of New Zealand history in 2021.

Cheryl is an experienced oral historian and has conducted over 120 in-depth interviews across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. She has served on the executive committee of the National Oral History Association of New Zealand since 2018.

She has also conducted commissioned histories including:

- The New Zealand AIDS Foundation Oral History Project
- Interviews with new mothers for Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s ‘In the Bubble: Covid-19 Pandemic Oral History Project’
- A web-based History of the Goodfellow Unit, 1978-2018 (https://goodfellowunit-history.blogs.auckland.ac.nz/)
- A web-based History of the New Zealand Society for Oncology, 1967-2018 (https://www.nzsoncology.org.nz/)