Cybèle is a Pākehā senior lecturer in the History Programme at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. Twentieth-century working-class narratives are central in Cybèle’s research work. Her first book, Workers in the Margins: Union Radicals in Post-war New Zealand, explores the roles women, Māori, Pasifika and unemployed workers played in working-class organisations and protest. Oral history enables the recovery of people's experiences who have been marginal to the historical record.

Cybèle’s most recent book, Comrade – Bill Andersen, A Communist, Working-Class Life (Bridget Williams Books, 2022), traces how trade union leader Bill Andersen encountered the world between 1924 and 2005, broadening political history to embrace communist history. An interview with Rebecca Macfie highlights the book’s key themes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUtJFtMdhuo. She has also published on communist Rona Bailey. https://lhp.org.nz/2024/04/01/lhp-bulletin-90-april-2024/

Currently she is researching and writing about New Zealand housewives' unions that formed to take action on the high cost of living between 1912 and 1977. She is also exploring her Irish Protestant ancestors’ part in settler colonialism, from 1865, in the Bay of Islands.