WELL known and internationally respected academic, poet and author Teresia Teaiwa was persistent to the end, submitting her last piece of academic work from her deathbed.
Professor Steven Ratuva, the director of the MacMillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, said the iconic scholar was an example for all Fijians.
“Teresia’s death is a great loss to Pacific academia,” he said.
“She was an iconic scholar whose work was internationally renowned. I had the great privilege of being her colleague and friend and was always inspired by her intellectual depth and humbleness.
“On her deathbed she sent me her last piece of academic work to be published in our new academic journal. It’s an example how persistent she was to the end. An example for all Fijians.”
The research centre directed by Professor Ratuva had launched a new academic journal called the Pacific Dynamics: Journal of Interdisciplinary Research.
Dr Teaiwa was the director of Va’aomanu Pasifika at Victoria University in Wellington. She died last week Tuesday after a short battle with cancer.
She was widely known and respected in the Pacific with some of her research covering militarism and gender, contemporary issues in Fiji and feminism, and women’s activism.
The University of Oregon described her as “a groundbreaking scholar in the research of the culture of the Pacific Islands”.
She was born in Honolulu to an I-Kiribati father and an African-American mother.
Dr Teaiwa was also co-editor of the International Feminist Journal of Politics.
In 2009, The Guardian, described her as one of Kiribati’s living national icons. She was laid to rest on Saturday in Porirua.
