Mary Cook is a doctoral candidate in UBC’s French department. She holds an MA in Teaching from the University of the Incarnate Word and a BA in English from the University of Otago. Her research focuses on French and British colonisation in the South Pacific, with particular attention to how word choice in non-fiction texts establishes and maintains structures of power between settlers and the Indigenous Mā’ohi inhabitants of the Society Islands.

Interests

• Polynesian cultures
• Myth, religion, and ritual
• Colonialism
• Deconstructionism

• Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, 2024
• Killam Donald N. Byers Prize, 2024
• Teaching Assistant Award, 2023
• Dorothy Dallas Scholarship, 2022
• Benjamin John Edinger Memorial Prize in French Literature, 2022

Graduate supervisor: Dr. Farid Laroussi

• “(Re)conceptualisations of nature: Adam and ‘apu”, Global French Studies: Transnational, Transcultural, and Transdisciplinary Perspectives, Australian Society for French Studies Conference, Dec. 2024
• “Anti-Catholicism in Diderot’s representation of Mā’ohi faith”, UBC FHIS Annual Symposium, University of British Columbia, May 2023
• “From the trunk of Taputapuatea to the mountains of Turehu: Prophecies of contact as Indigenous resistance and survival”, Plaiting Stories: Reflections on Indigenous Networks, University of British Columbia, Dec. 2022
• “Ke-ala-i-kahiki: Undermining linguistic ideologies towards Polynesian languages”, Movement(s), Australian Society for French Studies, Dec. 2022
• “Upside-down and scattered: Representations of Oceania in the anti-utopian works of Robida and Souvestre”, New Directions in Utopian Studies, Utopian Studies Society, Jul. 2022
• “The Anti-utopia and Oceania”, UBC FHIS Annual Symposium, University of British Columbia, May 2022