Pacific History Association

The next PHA conference is scheduled for 30 November - 2 December 2027 at The University of Papua New Guinea. It will be hosted by the School of Humanities and Social Sciences in Port Moresby at UPNG's Waigani Campus. Further announcements will be posted here in due course.

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Conference Theme: Confronting Legacies
 

Papua New Guinea, the country hosting this conference, has celebrated in 2025 its fiftieth year of Independence. This occasion sparked reflections on the country’s past, showing how much the present and future is largely shaped by historical legacies, be they ancestors’ oral traditions and/or the colonial past. Indeed, as Karl Marx wrote, people ‘make their own history […], but they do not make it just as they please […] but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’ (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte). It is with this framework in mind that we invite Pacific scholars to reflect on the theme of ‘confronting legacies’, and the power dynamics these legacies entail. How do the legacies of the past shaping our present affect and inform the kinds of histories we write, as well as the oral narratives we co-construct with our interlocutors? Are these legacies constraints we need to break free from in order to write other kinds of histories, or do we need to fully reckon with them to be able to imagine different futures? Is ‘Pacific History’, as a field, one of the legacies we have to confront?