Alice Te Punga Somerville

Professor Alice Te Punga Somerville (Māori – Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) is a Professor and Department Head in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia (UBC), holding a joint appointment with the UBC Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. She previously taught in New Zealand, Australia, and Hawai’i. Her work focuses on centering Indigenous expansiveness and deconstructing colonial frameworks through literary and cultural analysis.

• Education: MA (University of Auckland), PhD (Cornell University)
• Research Areas: Māori literatures, Indigenous studies, Pacific studies, decolonial theory

Her scholarship includes award-winning works like Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania (2012) and the poetry collection Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised (2022), which won the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Current research explores Indigenous texts from 1900-1975 across Oceania.

Her articles critically engage with colonial archives, Indigenous media, and trans-Pacific cultural connections. She co-produces the Belonging Together podcast profiling Indigenous Pacific research.

• Awards: Best First Book (2012), Peter and Mary Biggs Poetry Prize (2023)

Teaching emphasizes Indigenous pedagogies and decolonizing literary canons. She advises students on Māori and Pacific studies topics, collaborates across institutions, and maintains active research networks with Indigenous scholars globally.