Rate My Professor Catriona Malau

Dr Catriona Malau serves as Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia, within the College of Human and Social Futures. She obtained her Doctor of Philosophy and Bachelor of Arts (Honours), both from the Australian National University, where her PhD focused on the grammatical description of the North-East Ambae language. Prior to her current role, which she has held since 2009, Malau worked as a Lecturer at the University of the South Pacific's Pacific Languages Unit in Vanuatu (2006-2009), Postdoctoral Fellow at La Trobe University's Research Centre for Linguistic Typology (2002-2006), Project Manager for the Vanuatu Cultural Centre Oral Traditions Project (1998-2002), and Research Assistant at the Australian National University Department of Linguistics (1994). At Newcastle, she has taken on key administrative roles, including Deputy Head of School (Research Training) in Semester 1 2020 and from 2022-present, Head of Discipline (Linguistics) from July 2013 to December 2017, and Director of Student Experience in the School of Humanities and Social Science from 2012 to 2017.

Malau's primary research interests lie in language description, documentation, typology, and lexicography of Oceanic languages, particularly those of Vanuatu, including Vurës (spoken by approximately 1,500 people on Vanua Lava) and North-East Ambae. Over the past decade, she has extensively documented Vurës, supported by the Volkswagen Foundation's DoBeS programme since 2006, producing deposits in the DoBeS digital archive, a web-based multimedia dictionary, and creative works such as the children's book 'Teaavagaraga na Jowi go Marina (Jowi and Marina's Wedding)' (2023). Notable publications include her monograph 'A Grammar of Vurës, Vanuatu' (2016, Pacific Linguistics 651), 'A Dictionary of Vurës, Vanuatu' (2021, ANU Press), and co-authored 'The Language and Life of Vanua Lava' (2012). Recent articles feature 'CreoleVal: Multilingual Multitask Benchmarks for Creoles' (2024) and 'Change and variation in the possessive systems of the Vanuatu Polynesian Outliers' (2025). She has secured seven research grants totaling $390,613. In teaching, she covers introductory linguistics and linguistics for education. Malau has supervised 13 PhD students to completion and one current, earning the College Excellence Award for Research Supervision (2023), Citations for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning (Office for Learning and Teaching, 2012), and Vice-Chancellor's Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning (University of Newcastle, 2011). Her fieldwork involves community immersion, contributing to Pacific language maintenance and cultural identity.