Here is ELCC undergraduate student Rune Benzon featuring in The Post - her own writing about "a day out in search of our national bird." www.thepost.co.nz/environment/...

Her song features in Ryan Gosling’s hit movie, but Erima Maewa Kaihau was once a star too Over 100 years after Pō Atarau was popularised, it’s on the soundtrack of Ryan Gosling’s blockbuster Project Hail Mary. But who was the remarkable woman behind it?

ELCC PhD student Austin Haynes has a piece in The Conversation about Ryan Gosling's new movie and Erima Maewa Kaihau's music theconversation.com/her-song-fea...

Today!

Elegy is one of the most enduring and mobile of poetic modes, from ancient to modern times. Our half-day symposium brings together expertise from Te Herenga Waka and afar to consider the workings, implications, and affordances of elegy, from the quotidian, familial, and social, to the metaphysical, political, and environmental. Speakers: Professor Danielle Clarke, University College Dublin “Every elegie drawes some teare”: the multiplicity of early modern elegy This talk considers the many modalities of early modern elegy, alongside a consideration of its insistent recourse to metaphorical ways of imagining loss – numbers, landscapes, humours, planets, stars, dust, earth, stones. I will discuss poems by Katherine Phillips, Hester Pulter, Lucy Hutchinson, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, Rachel Fane, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Carey, Aemilia Lanyer, and Anne Southwell. My examples will focus on affect, numbers, erotic elegy and eco-grief – both contemporary and early modern. Professor Nikki Hessell, Te Herenga Waka Elegy Written in a Country Council Grove, in work from her Marsden project on The Poetics of Treaties: Settler Treaty-Making and Eighteenth-Century Poetry Dr Bonnie Etherington, Te Herenga Waka Submerged Stories of Logging By-Products: The Environmental Elegiac in Omar Musa’s Killernova (2021), in work from her Marsden project on Literatures of Environment and Disability from Oceania ALL WELCOME PLEASE RSVP for catering purposes to Alastair.Baldwin@vuw.ac.nz

Next up in our research seminars, we have our Elegies event, Thurs 26 March, 9am-11:45am, at the Stout Centre at Te Herenga Waka.

The event features talks by Danielle Clark (University College Dublin) & Nikki Hessell & Bonnie Etherington (THW)

To RSVP, please contact Alastair Baldwin

We've got an array of great events & speakers coming up in ELCC in 2026! Here's the first:

2:00 pm, 13/3 (zoom): "Holding the grief of those who survived: Okinawan Feminist Literature Resisting Militarization”. Celebrating Aya Sakima’s new book, with Bonnie Etherington, Shin Takahashi & Jinah Kim.

The cover of Grace Yee's book Chinese Fish

The cover of the Penguin Edition of Milton's Paradise Lost

And at third year?

The Renaissance of the Self (ENGL)
New Zealand Literature (ENGL)
Forms of Creative Communication: The Essay at Large (LCCM)

Cover of a modern edition of Wuthering Heights

A photograph of the NZ poet Fleur Adcock

At second year, we're teaching:

The Art of the Essay: Critical, Public, Personal (LCCM)
Dark and Stormy Nights: Gothic Literature (ENGL)
Modern Poetry (ENGL)

Cover of Te Moana o Reo: Ocean of Languages

Cover of Ko Aotearoa Tātao: We are New Zealand

Painting of the poet John Keats

Painting of William Shakespeare

We're getting ready to welcome our students on Monday!

Here's a little thread of what they'll be reading this trimester, starting with our first-year courses in the English and Literary & Creative Communication majors:

Wild Civility: English Literature 1380-1830 (ENGL)
The Art of Writing (LCCM)

Huge congratulations to Anna Jackson, whose book "Terrier, Worrier: A Poem in Five Parts" has been long-listed for the Okhams! www.nzbookawards.nz/new-zealand-...

Last call for 2026 tutoring applications! Please apply by Sunday 11 January if you want to be considered www.wgtn.ac.nz/sam/about/tu...

Photograph of the Hunter Council Chamber, a grand lecture hall. On the screen is the opening slide of Prof Alkhimie’s talk, which shows an image of a Black woman superimposed on a painting of the Venetian canals

Nearly time for Patricia Akhimie’s lecture on “Setting Othello,” hosted by @elccprogramme.bsky.social here at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

And then, in the second half of this week, we will be welcoming 50 speakers from around the world for a conference on 18th-century and Romantic studies www.wgtn.ac.nz/fhss/about/e...

Registration is still open for Patricia Akhimie's lecture next week, so please sign up - we would love to see you there! www.wgtn.ac.nz/events/2025/...

We have MA scholarships available for theses on 18th-century/Romantic poetry and/or settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty in poetry and other literary forms ... details here!

www.wgtn.ac.nz/scholarships...

We have a very big week of ELCC events coming up at the end of the month, starting with an exciting lecture by Patricia Akhimie, Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library!

Register here: www.wgtn.ac.nz/events/2025/...

We have a very big week of ELCC events coming up at the end of the month, starting with an exciting lecture by Patricia Akhimie, Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library!

Register here: www.wgtn.ac.nz/events/2025/...

Congratulations Nikki!

Jane Austen’s terrible parents 'Would you want General Tilney to be your daddy?'

One of the great things about the ELCC programme is that we have AMAZING emeritus professors.

Here is Professor Heidi Thomson in The Spinoff, talking about Austen thespinoff.co.nz/books/25-10-...

Photo of Charles Ferrall, with the author talk details that are included in the post

Charles Ferrall will be in Unity Books tomorrow (Tues 21) speaking to his recently released book South by South: New Zealand and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. He will be in conversation with Michalia Arathimos.

⛵ Free event–all welcome!
⛵ 21 October, 12:30–1:15pm
⛵ Unity Books Wellington

If you're in Ōtautahi this week, come along and hear ELCC's Anna Jackson in this fabulous lineup!

Invitation to book launch at Unity Books, Fri 24 October, 6pm

We seem to be awash in book launches here at ELCC! Please join us on 24 October for "Te Whāriki," edited by Dougal McNeill, Anna Jackson, and Robert Sullivan

Daylight saving is here, it feels like spring, maybe you should grab a copy of the Sunday Star Times and catch up on what the ELCC programme's poet and lecturer Anna Jackson has been reading? www.thepost.co.nz/culture/3608...

Thursday September 18th, 6pmIn-store at Unity Books WELLINGTONBook Launch: South by South: New Zealand and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration by Charles Ferrall

Please join the ELCC programme for the launch of Charles Ferrall's new book this Thursday at Unity! www.unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-eve...

Congratulations to our very own Charles Ferrall on his new book! It's being launched at Unity Books on Thurs 18 Sept - hope to see you there

Book review: Terrier, Worrier: A Poem in Five Parts Stella Chrysostomou from VOLUME Books reviews Terrier, Worrier: A Poem in Five Parts by Anna Jackson, published by Auckland University Press.

Anna Jackson's new book reviewed on Nine to Noon www.rnz.co.nz/national/pro...

Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa Chris Tse to Tayi Tibble – what New Zealand poetry looks like now.

The ELCC programme's Anna Jackson and Dougal McNeill, along with their co-editor Robert Sullivan, have a new book coming soon!

aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz/te-whariki/

Last call, THW folks. Anyone in humanities disciplines interested in the 18th or early nineteenth century and its legacies, please send us an abstract!

It's been a pleasure!

We're delighted to host the launch of Anna Jackson's new book, Terrier, Worrier, published by Auckland University Press.

We'll be celebrating Anna Jackson's new book of poems tonight at Unity!

(PS. if you're interested in becoming a better reader and writer of poetry, Anna is teaching her entry-level course LCCM 172: Reading and Writing Poetry, starting in July)
www.unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-eve...

An image of the certificate awarding the 2025 prize to Lindsay and Mehdy. The title of their paper is "Mapping the Tides of Style: A Computational Comparison of 'Quarterly Essay' and 'Longform Journalism'

Congratulations to former ELCC PhD students Lindsay Hayasaka (nee Morton) and Mehdy Sedaghat Payam, who have won the 2025 Susan L Greenberg Prize for the best research paper at the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies)!

We love seeing our graduates out succeeding in the world ❤️