Dr Nayahamui Rooney: Newly Appointed Chair of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau

The Dean of the College of Asia and the Pacific has appointed a new Chair of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, effective 1 July 2023. The incoming Chair is Dr Nayahamui Rooney, appointed for a term of two years.

Her research focuses on a range of cross-cutting topics, including gender and social issues in Papua New Guinea. She has examined the social and cultural changes in her homeland of Manus Island brought about by the Australian offshore detention centre, bringing her family history into dialogue with transnational transformations.

Her current research focuses on the life of PNG pre- and post-Independence politician Nahau Rooney (her mother), and it involves exploring the gendered dimensions of PNG’s political history through epistemological questions about how the past might be understood and made when we combine different epistemic approaches such as embodied mortuary events, visual and sensory methods, archival preservation, and political biography. Drawing on a wide range of methodological approaches including Indigenous knowledges, decolonial and critical/intersectional feminist methods, Nayahamui uses creative approaches such as ethnographic poetry and the analysis of oral traditions and material culture – and she is a passionate weaver of Manus baskets. She convenes the CHL courses: Asia and the Pacific: Power, Diversity and Change, and Gender and Sexuality in the Pacific.

Before achieving her PhD from the ANU Department of Pacific Affairs (DPA) in 2017, Nayahamui worked for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the World Bank in Papua New Guinea, and before arriving at CHL she was with the Crawford School of Public Policy Development Policy Centre working as a Research Fellow and a Lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG)'s School of Business and Public Policy, Masters in Economic and Public Policy Program under the ANU and UPNG partnership project. In becoming Chair, she succeeds Associate Professor Paul D’Arcy of the Bell School, who served effectively in the role for more than a decade. Many thanks to Paul for his service.

This new appointment brings “PAMBU” back to its institutional home at CHL. We wish Nayahamui all the best as she assumes this new position and look forward to collaborating closely with her and the PAMBU team in the coming years.