On June 12th 2025, we celebrate the concluding phase of our project with a Symposium at the National University of Samoa.
Please, find below the details of the academic papers presented.
Giulia Carozzi and Shari Sabeti (University of Edinburgh)
‘More-than a superfluous comma: a collaborative inquiry into the field of Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson.’
In this collaborative piece of writing, we inquire into our mutual attraction towards Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, her manner of writing and her way of living. We take up what we feel is Fanny’s legacy, both in the breaking of rules and conventions (including those of academic writing) and in not shying away from bringing ourselves onto the page. We embrace, with solid determination, an inquiry that does not always know where it is going. As we exchange pieces of writing, three concepts emerge and merge – cruising, shadows and (un)confinement. We explore these with Fanny: she keeps us together, making us look at our own stories and academic practices, both critically and differently.
Biographies:
Dr Giulia Carozzi is the ‘Remediating Stevenson’ project’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Giulia is based at the University of Edinburgh, where she also completed her Ph.D. in education. She is particularly passionate about what it means to write within the social sciences; her research focuses on ordinary spaces as sites of theoretical creation and informal learning. Giulia is a member of the Centre for Creative and Relational Inquiry (Edinburgh) for which she has been running (with Dr Fiona Murray) the “Pre-formative workshop series”.
Dr Shari Sabeti is Reader in Arts and Humanities Education at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her research focuses on the relationship between the arts (particularly literature and visual art), pedagogy and curriculum. Taking ethnographic and arts-based approaches, she pays detailed attention to the creative practice of artists, writers, art-educators and their students. She has conducted research in a variety of contexts including schools and museums, as well as community and commercial settings. Most recently, she has been engaged in several projects focused on art education, indigenous creative practices and decolonizing approaches to education in the Pacific region, notably Hawai‘i, Marshall Islands, and Samoa.
Simon Grennan (University of Chester)
‘Collaging Cassell’s Family Magazine in Sāmoa, Hawaiʻi and Scotland: cutting, drawing and reforming contingencies in established power relationships.’
Collage is work undertaken in any medium by fragmenting and repurposing existing media. It is increasingly recognised in a wide range of disciplines as a method of enquiry, used to identify underlying structures, systems and ideas and make them available to analysis, restructuring and reformation.
This paper will describe and reflect upon a series of collage workshops undertaken Honolulu, Hawaiʻi in 2022, with participants aged between 10 and 16 years, in Apia, Sāmoa in 2023 with participants aged between 12 and 14 years and in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2023 with participants aged between 9 and 11 years.
Participants created new drawn and collaged visual stories, utilising any aspects of original pages supplied from 1880s editions of Cassell’s Family Magazine, a British monthly general interest journal contemporaneous with Edinburgh-born Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific travels, relationships and life, belonging to the first publisher of Treasure Island in novel form (1883).
The paper will orient these workshops with a brief review of theories of collage, historicising the activity as a now- entrenched medium, understood to subvert traditional media. It will outline ways in which collage has been theorised as resistance, seeking to contradict or reform perceived inequities in existing power relationships, encompassing theorisations of the cut, as resistance to institutional coercion, colonial violence and hegemony, including the institution of language.
It will argue for a relational theorisation of collage, in which fragmenting and repurposing creates new power relationships between previously bifurcated makers and viewers. The chapter will utilise this theorisation to reflect upon some of the workshops participants’ approaches to thinking about and using parts of the 1880s Magazine.
Finally, the paper will focus on a new relationship between Honolulu collagist James and Mariam Kerns, the 1881 visual journalist whose drawings he uses to tell a new story. It will show how collagists entered 1880s British storyworlds, or reproduced generic expectations of their past and present, revised the past or created new equable dialogues with artists, writers and producers, across widely different times and places.
Biography
Dr Simon Grennan is an awarded scholar of visual narrative and graphic novelist. He is Professor of Art and Design and Associate Dean for Research and Innovation at the University of Chester and author of Thinking about Drawing (2022), A Theory of Narrative Drawing (2017), Marie Duval (2018) and Dispossession (2015). He is co-author of The Marie Duval Archive. He is half of international artists team Grennan & Sperandio and Principal Investigator for Marie Duval presents Ally Sloper and Co-investigator of Remediating Stevenson: Decolonising Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction through Graphic Adaptation, Arts Education and Community Engagement.
Richard Hill (Chaminade University of Honolulu)
‘Robert Louis Stevenson’s islands: modernity and the fringes of civilization.’
Robert Louis Stevenson invented the most famous island in Western literature: Treasure Island. Islands appear elsewhere throughout his work, especially once he relocated to the Pacific. Islands create a thread that connects his early works, including Treasure Island and Kidnapped, to his Pacific stories such as “The Beach of Falesá”, “The Bottle Imp”, “The Isle of Voices”, and The Ebb-Tide. What is it about islands that so fascinated Stevenson?
Working backwards from The Ebb-Tide, this paper will explore Stevenson’s interest in how islands not only work as “stages” for his narratives—confined spaces with hidden doors and vistas—but how they increasingly come to reflect the modern world of interconnectedness and globalization. Just as Samoa was connected to the outer world through steamers and mail, so Oahu was connected through phone lines and trade. The isle of Earraid from Kidnapped, where David Balfour is stranded, is actually connected to the mainland, while Treasure Island itself is connected through sailing routes and pirate treasure. If we were to consider John Donne’s phrase “No man is an island”, Stevenson’s work argues that no island is completely insular in the modern world; modernity is coming, even to the ancient untouched places of the world.
Biography
Richard Hill is a Professor of English at Chaminade University of Honolulu, on the island of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. He received his Ph.D. in English from Edinburgh University, where he worked on illustrations to the works of Sir Walter Scott. Since moving to Hawai‘i, he has been focusing on the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, and more broadly the literary connections between the Pacific and Scotland. He is the author and editor of several books, the most recent of which was published in 2024 by Brill, entitled Scottish Literature of the South Seas: Critical Studies of Scotland and the Pacific. He lives on Maui with his family, and teaches classes on Kaua‘i, Maui, Molokai, Lana‘i and O‘ahu.
Roslyn Jolly (University of New South Wales)
‘Moving Pictures: Graphic and Cinematic Impulses in Stevenson’s Narrative Fiction.’
Stevenson’s lifelong attraction to graphic storytelling media such as toy theatres and woodcut books was, in the 1880s, inflected by a growing interest in modern visual technologies such as photography and magic lantern slideshows, as well as by his ongoing fascination with the narratology of dreams. These various narrative media converge upon the topic of picture sequences and the realization that such sequences have the capacity to create (as in cinema) the illusion of movement.
Beginning with a discussion of the essays ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’ (1884) and ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ (1888) and of cinematic imagery in Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), this paper will proceed to more detailed consideration of narrative syntax in Stevenson’s Pacific writings. In particular, it will analyse Stevenson’s experiments with the verbal editing of images into sequences that produce narrative movements of different kinds — including jumps, cuts, and continuous streams of action – which may be considered proto-cinematic in their effect. The discussion will encompass the three stories of the Island Nights’ Entertainments (1893), paying particular attention to the co-presence of theatrical and cinematic transitions in that volume. It will then offer close readings of some proto-cinematic sequences in A Footnote to History (1892) and The Ebb-Tide (1894).
Biography
Roslyn Jolly is a literary scholar and travel writer. From 1994-2013 she taught English Literature at UNSW, Sydney, specializing in nineteenth-century British and American literature, travel writing and postcolonial literature. She is the author of Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction (1993) and Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession (2009). She also edited Stevenson’s South Sea Tales (1996) and Fanny Stevenson’s The Cruise of the ‘Janet Nichol’ among the South Sea Islands (2004). Since 2014 she has worked as a freelance arts critic and travel writer, while also holding a position as Honorary Research Associate in the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW. Her edition of Henry James’s Daisy Miller and Other Tales is scheduled for publication by Cambridge University Press later this year.
Keao NeSmith (University of Hawai‘i)
References to Robert Louis Stevenson in the Hawaiian language newspapers of the late nineteenth century
During his travels through the Pacific, Robert Louis Stevenson spent a short time in the Hawaiian Kingdom (from 1888 to 1889) during the reign of King David Kalākaua, but his fame had preceded him. He became not only a friend and confidant of Hawai‘i’s Head of State, but also that of many of the Hawaiian royal families.
This paper sheds light on a little-known facet of Stevenson’s reception by Hawaiians (and other Polynesian peoples) he encountered during his Pacific travels, offering the first extensive exploration of Hawaiian language newspaper reports on Stevenson’s activities while in the Hawaiian Kingdom.
Stevenson’s experiences in the Pacific islands influenced his philosophical and political views profoundly, and this re-examination of Hawaiian language material adds a rich and complex component to our understanding of his participation in the formation of nationhood, as well as his critique of Western expansionism in the Pacific. A strong advocate of the rights of the underdog, Stevenson witnessed the pretext to political violence of the US against the equally sovereign Hawaiian Kingdom under international law, as well as the interference of belligerent German, British, and US forces in Sāmoan politics, resulting in the rending apart of the people and islands of Sāmoa into disparate political entities.
In resisting aspects of Western imperialism, while at the same time reproducing Victorian racial stereotypes in his writing, Stevenson remains a well-beloved, if controversial figure, at the hinge of shifting political and philosophical machinations in the Pacific, neither all good nor all bad in the minds of modern Polynesians. The disparate underpinning reasons for Polynesian admiration of Stevenson as an historical figure are likely the most surprising findings of this review.
Biography
Dr Keao NeSmith is a descendant of native Hawaiian and native Scottish bloodlines born on the island of Kaua‘i in the Hawaiian Kingdom. He has several areas of interest, particularly in Hawaiian language and culture and Polynesian languages and cultures in general. He has a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Keao has translated and published several world renowned titles into his native Hawaiian language, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and the first book of the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling. Other titles, such as the Chronicles of Narnia series by CS Lewis and Winnie-the-Pooh by AA Milne, have been translated by him and remain to be published.
Sina Va‘ai (National University of Samoa)
‘Including the Fiction and Other Literary Works of Robert Louis Stevenson in Degree and Postgraduate Programmes in the Faculty of Arts at the National University of Samoa (NUS).’
The inclusion of Robert Louis Stevenson’s fiction, in the BA curriculum in the Faculty of Arts, was ‘a given’ as agreed to by the HOD of the English Department at the time in 1987 on the recommendation of the Consultant, Norma Jacobs, hired by NUS to provide a proposed structure, courses and regulations for the launching of a Bachelor of Arts programme and for majors in Literature and Linguistics. After months of vetting, the full proposal for the BA was forwarded for normal approval to Senate and then to Council.
Thus at the outset, Tusitala was given a place in the curriculum for Samoan students majoring in English literary studies in the 300 level course, HEN307 English Literature of the 19th Century. This course studied fiction and poetry from selected 19th Century writers in the first half of the semester and the poetry of selected poets in the second half of semester. RLS’ text, often described as a novella, the Beach of Falesa was chosen for close literary analysis, alongside the novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy and Wuthering Heights by Bronte in this course. Some 30 years later, in 2018, a second postgraduate course for English literary studies, HEN581 Tusitala : The Life and Fiction of RLS, was launched as an elective in the Postgraduate Diploma in Samoan Studies or Development Studies or in Arts as well as the option for a Masters by course work in the Masters Programme for the same three programmes in Arts, Development Studies or Samoan Studies.
Prior to that in 2003, HEN580 Images of Samoa in Post-Colonial Literature Written in English, which examined the literary representations of Samoa by Samoan writers had been offered in these programmes. As expected, this course honed in on the nation, since we are a National University, with a focus on Samoan writers and their images of the homeland, their creative literary output in English.
This presentation reflects on the significance of teaching of RLS’s corpus of fiction and other literary works in Degree and Postgraduate Programmes at NUS, the responses of Samoan students to field visits to the RLS Musuem and to his literary representations of Samoa, his adopted second home, the ‘Sacred Centre’ during the last four years of his life at Vailima.
Biography
Sina Vaai is Professor of English in the English and Foreign Languages (EFL) Department of the Faculty of Arts at the National University of Samoa. Her PhD thesis focused on Literary Representations of Western Polynesia (Fiji, Tonga and Samoa) by indigenous and migrant writers who call the Pacific region their home. Her other research interests include the promotion of creative writing in short story competitions for primary and secondary students; literacy – especially improving the reading, writing and research skills of first year university students; and indigenizing the curricula in the Pacific.
