ʻATENISI INSTITUTE

Beginning late April, ‘Atenisi’s dean of faculty, Vasalua Jenner-Helu, will commence a three-month residency at UK's Oxford University as Visiting Academic in Linguistics.

Ms Helu will be researching “linguistic chauvinism” in the UK in the 19th century, specifically whether the English language was deemed superior to foreign languages. The investigation will inform her PhD thesis regarding alleged chauvinist attitudes of UK and Australian missionary linguists as they "modernised" various Polynesian languages. She will be guided at Oxford by Austronesian linguist Dr Charlotte Hemmings.

Ms Helu is the second ‘Atenisi faculty member to be recently recognised by an elite U.K. university. Her predecessor as dean of faculty, Dr Lorenz Gonschor, was invited to write the chapter on 19th century politics in Cambridge University’s definitive History of the Pacific Ocean (Vol. 2), published in 2023.

Ms Helu holds a B.A. in linguistics from Victoria University of Wellington and an M.A. with honours in the discipline from the University of the South Pacific/Vanuatu.