Incoming Department Head Dr. Alice Te Punga Somerville (left) shares a moment with outgoing Department Head Dr. Patricia Badir (right) at the 2024 English Language & Literatures spring party. Photo by Roger Larry.
The UBC Department of English Language & Literatures is pleased to welcome Dr. Alice Te Punga Somerville (Māori – Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) as our new Department Head. As of July 1, 2024, Dr. Te Punga Somerville will assume her Headship following Dr. Patsy Badir, who has steered EL&L since 2019.
“When I relocated with my family across the Pacific to come and join the English Department at UBC, it was because I was aware of some bold moves the department had made: new hires, including a significant cluster hire, and people working on meaningful research that build connections across and beyond the university,” says Dr. Te Punga Somerville. “Since arriving, I have also witnessed a revisioning of the graduate curriculum and conversations about how to make good on institutional commitments, especially around the Indigenous Strategic Plan and the StEAR framework.”
All of this work has all been done under the guidance of Dr. Badir, who has been the Department mainstay over the past five years. “I am very aware of the metaphorical big shoes I have to fill when I step into this role after Patsy,” continues Dr. Te Punga Somerville, “and I acknowledge her work and approach that have brought us to this point, through the pandemic shutdowns, no less!”
Dr. Te Punga Somerville looks forward to grappling with urgent conversations about the meaning and value of studying English language and literatures and the range of work we do in our classrooms, research, communities and beyond. She is especially interested in how these conversations respond to the diverse experiences and aspirations of Indigenous, racialized and marginalized people, to the climate emergency, and to the current state of world politics including diverse forms of oppression and violence.
“As an Indigenous person, of course I have thoughts about the legacies and limits of these institutions – but I also know the potentially liberatory work that can happen in these places and in this discipline. While I don’t go to bed at night dreaming of spreadsheets or policy, I do actually enjoy this kind of work. I find it meaningful,” she says. “The next few years we will be figuring out as a department how to consolidate and communicate who we are now and what we can contribute. My hope is that we will figure out the ‘what happens next’ question for ourselves and for the communities we serve but also for the discipline, academy, and the world at large.”
Dr. Badir, whose headship ends as of June 30th, 2024, looks to the future of the department with hope and optimism. “We are a different Department than the one I joined 30 years ago, and we are now so well equipped to meet the challenges of the future,” she says. “We are a bold and creative group of faculty and staff with the intellectual and affective capacity to untangle any ball of knots the world can throw at us. I know this because I have seen us do it. I am so very proud of the things we have accomplished together. With Alice at the helm, I believe we are unstoppable.”
Professor Alice Te Punga Somerville (Māori – Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) is a scholar, poet, and irredentist. She holds a joint appointment with the UBC Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. Before UBC, she has taught at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, in Australia, Hawai’i, and elsewhere in New Zealand. She is the author of Once Were Pacific: Maori connections to Oceania which won Best First Book 2012 from Native American & Indigenous Studies Association, and 250 Ways to Write an Essay about Captain Cook (2020). Her collection of poetry (Auckland Uni Press, 2022) is called Always Italicise: how to write while colonised. Alice serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals and is the editor of the Journal of New Zealand Literature.
Professor Patricia Badir specializes in Renaissance drama and poetry with a particular interest in religious writing. She has a secondary interest in early twentieth-century Canadian theatre. Her book, The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550-1700, was published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2009. As of January 2025, Dr. Badir will take on the role of Associate Dean, Faculty, within the UBC Faculty of Arts. Before then, she hopes to finish one book (long in the making) and start another.
