Rate My Professor Van Heekeren

Deborah Van Heekeren serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology within the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University, a position to which she was promoted in 2014 following her prior role as Lecturer in Anthropology documented in 2010 faculty records. Her academic career at Macquarie University encompasses teaching contributions, including co-convening the unit The Anthropology of Contemporary Religions in 2017, and supervision of PhD theses such as Making Art and Community: An Ethnographic Study of Being an Emerging Artist in Sydney by David Jonathan Scott in 2018 and Sustainable Consumption: Sharing Meals in an Ecovillage by Bridget Jay in 2014. Van Heekeren's research specializations focus on Melanesian anthropology, with extensive fieldwork among the Vula'a people of Papua New Guinea. Her investigations explore the appropriation of Christianity in village contexts, sorcery accusations and responses in Christian settings, the phenomenology of Melanesian identity and myth, oral traditions including naming and mnemonics, poetics of knowing, cosmology preservation through stories, and reflections on dwelling temporality in Christian Papua New Guinea.

Key publications by Van Heekeren include her monograph The Shark Warrior of Alewai: A Phenomenology of Melanesian Identity (2019), which advances an ontological approach to identity. Notable journal articles and chapters are Singing it 'Local': The Appropriation of Christianity in the Vula'a Villages of Papua New Guinea (The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2011), The Kila Wari Stories: Framing a Life and Preserving a Cosmology (2008), 'Don't Tell the Crocodile': An Existentialist View of Melanesian Myth (Critique of Anthropology, 2004), Hiding Behind the Church: Towards an Understanding of Sorcery in Christian Papua New Guinea (2016), Searching for Fish Names with the Vula'a of Papua New Guinea (2017), Naming, Mnemonics, and the Poetics of Knowing in Vula'a Oral Traditions (Ocean Yearbook, 2014), Why Alewai Village Needed a Church: Some Reflections on Christianity and Ontology (The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2014), and The Temporality of Dwelling in Christian Papua New Guinea (The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2025). Additional works encompass Celebrating Mother's Day in a Melanesian Village Church (Pacific Studies, 2003) and reviews such as Gender, Ritual, and Social Formation in West Papua (Anthropos, 2011). Her scholarship appears in peer-reviewed outlets, contributing to understandings of cosmology, myth, history, and Christianity in Melanesia.