Research Students

We welcome applications from students wishing to complete an MA or PhD in Literature. 

Thinking of applying to be a research student?

• Look at the profiles of staff members in Literature, to identify a potential supervisor in your area of interest, and find out more about their own research. Get in touch with them via email to discuss your interests.
• Through informal discussions with a potential supervisor (usually involving at least one face-to-face or zoom meeting), you will shape your ideas into a research intent.
• Submit a completed application for admission (postgraduate), which includes your research intent, along with a CV, transcripts and other important documents. Please check that you enclose all the necessary documents when applying.

Information for Current Research Students

• Research students work with a principal supervisor, and often one or more secondary or associate supervisors. Your supervisor should be your first port of call with questions regarding your studies.
• For administrative queries, you may also sometimes need to contact the Administrative Assistant for SPACE (Ms Temalesi Waqainabete).

Current research 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.