“Alexander Mawyer is an associate professor in Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, where he also serves as the director of the Center for Pacific Islands Studies (since August 2021). He is editor of The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs and codirector of the university’s Biocultural Initiative of the Pacific. His research focuses on the intersections of language, culture, nature, and history, with fieldwork experience in French Polynesia (Mangareva, Society Islands) and Micronesia (Chuukese and Mortlock communities). Mawyer has published widely on topics such as environmental semantics in Eastern Polynesian languages, spatial cognition, marine resource governance in Tahiti, and biocultural conservation. He coedited Varua Tupu: New Writing from French Polynesia, the first English-language anthology of Ma‘ohi literature. He also serves as an adviser to NOAA’s West Hawai‘i Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (IEA).”