DrApril Henderson

Tēnā koe. After a lengthy period of service as Programme Director of Va'aomanū Pasifika, I passed the directorship to my colleague Le'ausālilō Sadat Muaiava in early 2025 and am currently enjoying a renewed focus on research and teaching responsibilities.

A sustained focus of my scholarship to date is the circulation of music and performing and visual art forms between the US, the Pacific Islands, and Aotearoa New Zealand. This work uses multi-sited ethnographic approaches—following things, people and ideas across time and geography—to understand Pacific aspirations, representations, contexts and practices and to illuminate their political, economic, and social stakes. This research has long fed into my teaching of courses that focus on themes of migration, diaspora, identity, artistic practice, activism, and globalisation and popular culture. Other research, funded by a Marsden FastStart research grant, explored people's meaning-making about Pacific Islands coconut commodities in both their Pacific contexts of production and international sites of consumption. An additional interest is the history and conceptualisation and practice of the interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary field of Pacific Studies itself.

In addition to my own research, an essential part of my scholarly work involves facilitating the development and publication of Pacific research by others, most notably through supervision of postgraduate students and by creating publication opportunities for Pacific scholars in internationally ranked peer-reviewed journals and my book series Indigenous Pacifics, co-edited with Professor Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua (U Hawai’i Press). From my location in Pacific Studies, I consider the nurturing of new and emerging researchers—particularly those of indigenous Pacific descent—to be a core responsibility of my work and, alongside my own publications, an important indication of my scholarly impact.

I gained my qualifications at Pitzer College (Anthropology: advisor Donald Brenneis), the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (Pacific Islands Studies: MA thesis committee members Terence Wesley-Smith, Geoff White, and Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard), and the University of California, Santa Cruz (History of Consciousness: PhD thesis committee members James Clifford, Angela Y. Davis, Neferti X. Tadiar, and Herman Gray). My approach to the interdisciplinary field of Pacific Studies, and much of my learning and teaching philosophy, is shaped by fifteen years spent working alongside the founding Programme Director of Pacific Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, the late Teresia Teaiwa. It is both my responsibility and privilege to carry these critical intellectual genealogies into the classroom and my supervision work, sharing tools with the students who will shape not only the future of our academic fields, but the contours of our worlds beyond.