Margaret Tennant is Professor of History and Dean of the Graduate Research School at Massey University, Palmerston North. She is the recipient of many awards and fellowships that acknowledge her work on the history of social welfare.

Margaret Tennant’s main research interests are in women's history and the history of health and social policy. She has an on-going interest in the history of gender in the social services and in the historical relationship between the state and the non-statutory welfare sector. In the last ten years internationally-refereed publications have included articles on the history of menstruation, on Maori mission work, on deaconesses and church social work, on gender, ethnicity and notions of ‘disadvantage’ in constructing New Zealand childhood, and on historical conceptions of the relationship between government and voluntary sector welfare.

Her most recent BWB publication, The Fabric of Welfare, draws on this research, and complements team research in the New Zealand part of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project.