I finished my first Ph.D. in 2001, with a dissertation on New Zealand prison argot. I also have a fellowship diploma in performance from Trinity College in London, and I’m starting my fourth year as a Ph.D. student in theater studies at Cornell.
I have a martial arts background, and I choreograph combat scenes for theater performances—mostly unarmed stuff.
About 170 published plays and a considerable number of unpublished typescripts.
This Man, a 1969 play by Francis Bugotu and Tony Hughes, written to mark the consecration of the new cathedral for the Diocese of Melanesia at Honiara in the Solomon Islands. It’s about the impact of Western culture, and it’s a morality play that draws on Christian truths. It’s really early [for Pacific Island theater]. It’s probably just a playscript that was never formally published, but I know it’s out there.
It can be the only way to buy the texts I want. If I want a play from New Guinea published in 1971, the Internet becomes a very useful resource. I’d say half of my collection comes from places I’ve been or directly from the playwrights and half comes from the Internet.
Overall there is a real growth of women who are publishing in Oceania. I have a play by Dianna Fuemana, who is from Niue, the world’s smallest self-governing nation. It has about 1,400 people. To hear a Niuean voice on stage, to hear the language, is exciting—plus the play is formally groundbreaking.
I’m a Ph.D. student in mathematics. I’m studying p-adic analysis and L-functions.
He was one of the first writers I got interested in. He has a very short but important book on Galois theory. It’s just seventy pages, but he starts with nothing and builds up the whole theory. It’s really well written, using one area of math to understand another. Artin renovated Galois theory and opened the door to much of what number theorists are working on now. His books are right in that window where a lot of them are out of print but not so rare that you can’t find them.
In my first year of grad school, I was an extra on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While I was there, I was reading Artin’s book on Galois theory. If you look closely you can see me reading it. I figure if I got Artin on Buffy, that’s a pretty good thing.
There’s a book on number theory that people told me was out of print and unobtainable. I was standing in my professor’s office talking about it, and he searched for it online. I had done the exact same search three hours before, and there were no copies listed. But when my professor looked, there it was for $17. I ordered it on the spot.
Apparently physicists are starting to find applications in string theory for this esoteric number theory that I do. Cryptographers use a lot of this stuff, too. All of the weird, esoteric math people were doing fifty years ago has applications now. Maybe in fifty or a hundred years, the math I’m doing will be useful.