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Thomas White imageMA (Edinburgh), MA (Durham), PhD (Otago)

Postdoctoral Fellow
Pacific religion; religion and health; religion, law and politics

Richardson 5C18, 5th Floor, Richardson Central Tower
Email tom.white@otago.ac.nz

Tom is the lead field researcher for The Levuka Study, a longitudinal project measuring religion, cooperation, health and well-being across a cohort of 570 Fijians living on the periphery of Fiji’s market economy.

Tom’s research focuses on the histories, politics and effects of religious change in Oceania, with a specialisation on the Fiji Islands. He is especially interested in expanding the study of Pacific Secularities, a line of enquiry that examines how different Pacific Islands groups – past and present – engage, adapt and defy those norms of law and governance that root in a North Atlantic history of secularism.

Pacific Secularities website

This has led to publications on a range of contemporary Pacific Islands issues, including:

Tom has taught Pacific History and History and Theory at Waikato University, as well as a variety of critical and scientfic Religion papers at the University of Otago. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Leipzig University’s Kolleg Forschungsgruppe Multiple Secularities, and served as both the Head of Department of Ethics and Governance and Acting Head of School of Social Sciences at the Fiji National University in Suva.

His PhD – Contronymic Secularism: The Constitutional Politics of Religion in Fiji – was officially awarded as 'Exceptional' by Otago’s Division of Humanities in 2020.

Exceptional doctoral theses in the Division of Humanities

Publications

White, T. (2025, April). Levuka Study: Measuring health, cooperative networks and religious change in Fiji. College of Humanities, Education and Law Seminar, Fiji National University, Fiji. [Research Presentation]. Other Research Output

White, T. (2025, April). Pacific secularities: Navigating Christian establishment and religious freedom in Oceania. School of Law and Social Sciences Seminar Series, University of the South Pacific, Fiji. [Research Presentation]. Other Research Output

Te Paa Daniel, J., White, T., Barker, R., Neoh, J., & Roose, J. (2025, February). Freedom of religion or belief in the Pacific: Past, present, and future [Invited]. Panel discussion at the International Center for Law and Religion Studies (ICLRS) Symposium, Auckland, New Zealand. Conference Contribution - Verbal presentation and other Conference outputs

White, T. (2024). Divergent secularities in the Ra Christian state sedition trial in Fiji in 2017. Proceedings of the 6th Annual Challenge the Horizon Pacific Research Symposium. Retrieved from https://www.waikato.ac.nz/students/pacific-at-waikato/ Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Abstract

White, T. (2024, October). The Levuka Study: Quantifying the effects of socio-economic and religious change on health and well-being in Fiji. Anthropology Seminar Series, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. [Research Presentation]. Other Research Output

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