Inter-regional Panel: Terence Wesley-Smith and Tarcisius Kabutaulaka in conversation with Cathryn Clayton

Speakers:

Terence Wesley-Smith is a political scientist with the UH Center for Pacific Islands Studies and served as Center Director from 2010 to 2018. He has published articles, book chapters and books about China’s rise in Oceania, including China in Oceania: Reshaping the Pacific? (2010, Oxford: Berghahn Books). He is currently working on a project exploring the implications of China’s growing influence in Oceania.

Tacisius Kabutaulaka has served as the director of the Center for Pacific Islands Studies since 2018. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Australia National University, has taught at the University of the South Pacific, and publishes on civil unrest, regional intervention, and governance issues in the Pacific Islands, and on China in Oceania. He is the editor of the Pacific Islands Monograph Series (PIMS).

Cathryn Clayton is chair of the Asian Studies Program at UHM, and a specialist on Chineseness: how and why it becomes a compelling form of collective subjectivity, whether nationalist, diasporic, regional, or civilizational. Her 2009 book Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness (Harvard Press East Asia Monograph Series) won the Francis Hsu Book Prize.

Co-Sponsors:

UH Center for Pacific Islands Studies

Asian Studies Program