Holly Thorpe

Holly Alysha Thorpe is a New Zealand academic, and is a full professor at the University of Waikato, specialising in sports sociology.

Academic career
Thorpe was a competitive snowboarder. She completed a PhD titled Boarders, Babes and Bad-Asses: Theories of a Female Physical Youth Culture at the University of Waikato in 2007. Thorpe then joined the faculty of the university, rising to full professor in 2019. Her inaugural professorial lecture described how new sports like snowboarding came to be included in the Olympic Games. Her research covers gender, youth, extreme and action sports and how sport can contribute to development.

Thorpe is a principal investigator in the Te Pūnaha Matatini Centre of Research Excellence. She has written five books and edited a further nine. Thorpe is a founding member of WHISPA, a High Performance Sport NZ working group on healthy women in sport.

Awards
In 2009 Thorpe was awarded a scholarship by the Leverhulme Trust to visit the University of Brighton, where she wrote a book about snowboarding culture.

Thorpe was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 2011 to visit Georgetown University to compare the extreme sport experiences of New Zealand and American children and youth. and a Leverhulme Fellowship. In 2018 she was awarded a Royal Society Early Career Research Excellence Award for Social Sciences, and in the same year was awarded Fellowship of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.

Thorpe was awarded a James Cook Research Fellowship in 2021, for research titled 'Reconceptualizing Wellbeing: Women, Sport and Communities of Belonging'. Her project explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women, and their strategies for maintaining connection, wellbeing and physical health during the pandemic.