Bartholomew has also lived and worked in Malaysia and in 2009 worked in sociology at
International University College of Technology. In April 2010 he took up a teaching position at
Botany Downs Secondary College in Auckland, New Zealand. He is currently an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. In 2012, Bartholomew published ''Australia's forgotten children: The corrupt state of education in the Northern Territory: A case study of educational apartheid at an aboriginal pretend school'' in which he uncovered human rights abuses of
indigenous Australian aboriginal children who were being exposed to harmful
asbestos in the
Northern Territory with the knowledge of the Northern Territory
Department of Education. Bartholomew's principal area of academic contribution is in the field of
mass psychogenic illness, previously known as mass hysteria, both historical and present day cases, an area he has been studying for over 25 years. He has written extensively about 600 notable instances including the
Salem witch trials, the
2011 Le Roy illness, which Bartholomew has described as "the first case of this magnitude to occur in the U.S. during the social networking era", Bartholomew has also drawn attention to the role of the internet in acting as an "
echo chamber" for spreading moral outrage; for example on
social media, pedophile allegations used as political weapons by supporters of the
far right against
liberal celebrities, which mirrors earlier public outrage which took the form of the
Red Scare (particularly
McCarthyism) and the
Lavender scare against homosexuals in US government positions. Bartholomew is frequently interviewed as an expert on topics as diverse as the "Pokémon Panic" of 1997, the spread of
UFO conspiracy theories, the
2016 clown panic (which he suggested was a
moral panic fueled by social media in response to a fear of strangers and terrorism), the viral spread of online fads such as
Pokémon Go, and
Havana syndrome, the suspected energy weapon attacks against American and Canadian government personnel which began in 2016, about which he said: In 2020, Bartholomew co-authored
Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria, a book on the sonic attack controversy in Cuba, with Professor Robert W. Baloh, a neurologist at the
UCLA Medical Center. The book document dozens of similar examples of disorders that have essentially the same features as "Havana Syndrome", but were given different labels, from the 18th century belief that sounds from certain musical instruments were harmful to human health, to contemporary panics involving people living near wind turbines. In 2020, Bartholomew's self-published ''No Māori Allowed: New Zealand's Forgotten History of Racial Segregation'', which looked at the history of segregation and discrimination against
Māori people in the Auckland suburb of
Pukekohe. His research found that 73% (237) of all Māori deaths aged 14 years and under in Pukekohe between 1925 and 1961 were caused by preventable conditions linked to poverty and poor housing such as
bronchitis,
diphtheria,
dysentry,
gastroenteritis, malnutrition,
measles,
pneumonia,
tuberculosis, and
whooping cough. On 19 June 2020, Bartholomew told
Te Ao Maori News that a publisher had said his book
No Māori Allowed was too pro-Maori. Bartholomew maintained that the stories of segregation needed to be told and New Zealand must '"acknowledge its racist past." In 2022, Bartholomew's book was adapted into a
TVNZ documentary called
No Māori Allowed by Megan Jones, Reikura Kahi and Corinna Hunzike. Bartholomew's research on Pukekohe has been cited by Adele N. Norris, Gauri Nandedkar, Meg Parsons and Byron Williams. ==Views and positions==