Writing the New World

‘Writing the New World’ is a research project led by Associate Professor Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Ātiawa, Taranaki) at the Faculty of Māori & Indigenous Studies, University of Waikato, supported by a Marsden Fund grant. The podcast shares research and ideas related to the research project, co-produced and hosted by Wanda Ieremia-Allan. Sixteen Indigenous researchers have worked with Alice on this journey of connecting with the massive, multilingual and rich legacy of writing in the Pacific region. The project focuses on writing published by Indigenous people connected to New Zealand, Australia, Fiji and Hawai’i between 1900 and 1975. Some people published books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and plays before 1975, but most of this writing was published in periodicals: magazines, newspapers, journals. This podcast celebrates what can happen when we connect across generations, archives, disciplines, institutions, communities, experiences, and perspectives.