The effort over the past few years will be capped on Saturday when he graduates with a doctorate from the University of Otago.
Mr Palenski (66), chief executive of the Dunedin-based New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame, has written or co-authored about 40 books.
If his apparent change in direction surprises some, Mr Palenski is taking it all in his stride.
He had not set out to "shock people", but to try something new when he ventured into academic study.
"People put you in a pigeonhole because they perceive you in a certain way," he said.
"Any writer should be able to write about anything, provided he or she does the research." His thesis is called The Making of New Zealanders: The evolution of national identity in the nineteenth century. In it, he argues immigrants thought of themselves as New Zealanders, rather than transplanted Britons or other immigrants, earlier than previously thought.
Many historians had seen events like the Boer War (1899-1902), the rugby union team's tour of Britain in 1905-06 and the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, as "breakthroughs in a sense of national identity". They were actually "an affirmation of an identity that had already been formed" in the previous century, Mr Palenski said.
Otago University historian Prof Tom Brooking, who, with fellow historian Dr Alexander Trapeznik, supervised Mr Palenski's thesis, said it was "a very good piece of work", which he hoped would be published as a book.
Mr Palenski, an old boy of King Edward Technical College, was a journalist at the Evening Star in Dunedin in the 1960s. He later moved to Wellington in 1972 and, after 30 years in journalism, returned to Dunedin in 1997. He chaired the Otago Rugby Football Union for seven years to 2010.
Even while working on his doctorate, Mr Palenski managed to write several books on non-academic subjects.
He was always looking ahead for further projects, and now, he said, those were likely to include writing articles for academic journals.
