Summary

The 2026 HFE Distinguished Lecture featured Hsinya Huang, Distinguished Professor of American and Comparative Literature at National Sun Yat-sen University (NSYSU), Taiwan. Professor Huang received this year’s Seres Puentes Award during the event. The Spanish phrase Seres Puentes translates to “Bridge-Being” or “Bridge Builder,” and the award—first bestowed in 2005—honors distinguished writers, scholars, and public servants for their work advancing justice and equity and for their service to the humanities on behalf of all living things.

“Islanding the Pacific: Syaman Rapongan’s Oceanic Poetics and Indigenous Relationality”. This lecture examines Syaman Rapongan’s poetics through islanding as an Indigenous epistemological and relational practice. A leading Tao writer from Lanyu (Orchid Island), Taiwan, Syaman articulates an archipelagic cosmology grounded in Indigenous knowledge, multispecies kinship, and Pacific relationality. His writings reconceive islands as living nodes in an interconnected oceanic world, where currents, tides, stars, fish, and whales act as agents of history and memory. Through embodied practices such as tatala (canoe) building and seasonal fishing, islanding replaces territorial borders with oceanic routes. In dialogue with Epeli Hau‘ofa, Craig Santos Perez, and Teresia Teaiwa, the lecture proposes islanding as a framework for decolonial memory and oceanic solidarity.