Two of Literature's Current Graduate Students

Hilda Vukikomoala is working on her Master’s in Literature, and her research aims to shed light on the neglected contributions of Pacific Island women towards the establishment of Pacific Literature. Her main repository of research will be Pacific journals and periodicals from the 1960s-1990s. Her research aims to identify shared themes, styles and approaches in the literature of the women writers, to investigate the impact of women writers and their published works on the decolonisation processes then occurring across the Pacific Islands, and to think regionally (citing Epeli Hauofa’s “Our Sea of Islands”) but also to look at nation-specific issues and contexts.

Laisani Lesumaisireli’s MA Literature research focuses on the metaphorical reading of sandalwood in Fiji. The study involves a specific time period in the history of Fiji. It proposes that we read sandalwood as a metaphor for I-Taukei experience, both in terms of the cultural and ecological violence experienced during the pre-colonial period, and in terms of strategies of cultural regrowth and revitalization after independence. This thesis aims to give a voice to this era and through archival sources and field gathering, piece together narratives for the Indigenous people of Fiji.