Professor Greg Ryan (BA, MA, PhD Canterbury) is a Professor of History in the Faculty of Environment, Society and Design at Lincoln University.

Greg is the author of three monographs, Forerunners of the All Blacks: The 1888–89 New Zealand Native Football Team in Britain, Australia and New Zealand (1994), The Making of New Zealand Cricket: 1832–1914 (2004), and The Contest for Rugby Supremacy: Accounting
for the 1905 All Blacks (2005). The Making of New Zealand Cricket won the Ian Wards Prize named after the Chief Government Historian in New Zealand and awarded to published work that makes substantial, imaginative and exemplary use of New Zealand archives. Greg is the co-author of Sport and the New Zealanders: A History (2018) which won the 2019 ASSH Book Award. He is also the editor of two books, Tackling Rugby Myths: Rugby and New Zealand Society, 1854–2004 (2005), and The Changing Face of Rugby The Union Game
and Professionalism since 1995 (2008).

In 2013, Greg delivered the keynote address to the Sporting Traditions conference in Canberra. The hallmarks of Greg’s work are meticulous research and artful contextualisation. He clearly labels speculative propositions and eschews sweeping generalisations, and he embraces complexity and contradiction. In these regards Greg is particularly well known for challenging what he calls the myths of the rural origins of the early All Black teams. In addition to his scholarship, Greg served as the Dean of Environment, Society and Design at Lincoln, and he has made significant contributions to the history of sport through extensive editorial roles. He is a regional editor for Africa, Australasia and the Pacific with The International Journal of the History of Sport and serves on the editorial boards of Sporting Traditions, Sport in History, and the New Zealand Journal of History.