Rate My Professor Damon Salesa

Professor Damon Ieremia Salesa is the Vice-Chancellor of Auckland University of Technology, a position he has held since April 2022. An interdisciplinary scholar of Samoan descent, he specialises in Pacific history and works on topics related to Oceania, including history and politics. Salesa earned a Master of Arts from the University of Auckland in 1997 and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford in 2001 as the first Rhodes Scholar of Pacific descent.

Prior to his current role, Salesa served as an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan and later as co-head of Te Wānanga o Waipapa (School of Māori Studies and Pacific Studies) and Pro Vice-Chancellor (Pacific) at the University of Auckland. His major publications include the book Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (2012), which received the Ernest Scott Prize; Island Time: New Zealand's Pacific Futures (2017); and An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays (2023), which won the general non-fiction award at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In 2021, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi for his contributions to Pacific Studies, and in 2023 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford.

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