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Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania

Home2026 Distinguished Lecture

ALICE TE PUNGA SOMERVILLE
2026 ASAO DISTINGUISHED LECTURER

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Alice Te Punga Somerville


Dr. Alice Te Punga Somerville is professor and department head in the Department of English Languages and Literatures at The University of British Columbia. She also holds an appointment with the UBC Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. She is the author of Once Were Pacific: Maori connections to Oceania (Minnesota 2012) which won Best First Book 2012 from the Native American & Indigenous Studies Association, and 250 Ways to Write an Essay about Captain Cook. Her collection of poetry Always Italicise: how to write while colonised (Auckland University Press 2022/University of Hawai’i Press 2024) won the Peter and Mary Biggs Prize for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in 2023. Her current research project “Writing the New World: Indigenous texts 1900-1975” focuses on published writing by Indigenous people from New Zealand, Australia, Hawai’i and Fiji. She co-produces the Writing the New World podcast (with Wanda Ieremia-Allan), which profiles researchers and ideas connected to the project. She is completing a book about that research called “Belonging Together: Periodicals and the Indigenous Pacific.”