Professor Alice Te Punga Somerville (Māori – Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) joined the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures in 2022. She holds a joint appointment with the UBC Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. She has previously taught in New Zealand, Australia and Hawai’i. Professor Te Punga Somerville is a scholar, poet and irredentist. At its heart, her research and teaching engages texts in order to centre Indigenous expansiveness and de-centre colonialism. Her MA (Auckland) and PhD (Cornell) focused on Māori written literatures; as she sought broader contexts for thinking about the writing of her own community, she developed a twin interest and expertise in Indigenous studies and Pacific studies.

Alice is the author of Once Were Pacific: Maori connections to Oceania (Minnesota 2012) which won Best First Book 2012 from Native American & Indigenous Studies Association, and 250 Ways to Write an Essay about Captain Cook (BWB 2020). Her collection of poetry Always Italicise: how to write while colonised (Auckland Uni Press, 2022/ Uni 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. A podcast (co-produced with Wanda Ieremia-Allan) profiles researchers and ideas connected to the project; Alice is completing a book about that research called ‘Belonging Together: periodicals and the Indigenous Pacific.’