Richard Moyle, Director of the Centre for Pacific Studies, is a graduate of The University of Auckland. He has held teaching positions at Indiana University and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and for eight years was a Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra. He came to Pacific Studies after 22 years in the Department of Anthropology. His teaching focuses on the musics of Polynesia and Aboriginal Australia, and he continues to teach a combined second- and third-year undergraduate course on the Music of the Pacific. Since 1993 Richard has also been Director of the Archive of Maori and Pacific Music. 

Richard's research career spans 43 years, including 10 years of fieldwork in Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Niue, the northern Cook Islands, Central Australia, and Takuu. His many books include landmark volumes on the musics of Samoa, Tonga, Takuu, the Pintupi, Alyawarra and Kukatja Aboriginal tribes, and also bilingual collections of oral tradition from Samoa, Tonga and Takuu. He is the only ethnomusicologist to receive a Marsden Grant. His current major project is a bilingual ethnographic dictionary of Takuu, a Polynesian-speaking island within Papua New Guinea political territory.

A showcase of the high quality research and expertise at The University of Auckland, Inquiring Minds is a series of conversations between well-known broadcaster Kerre Woodham and six academics from the Faculty of Arts. 

View Richard Moyle's interview on Inquiring Minds
An ethnomusicologist, Richard has spent much of the past 14 years carrying out fieldwork on the sinking atoll of Takuu, a small island off Papua New Guinea. He talks about the challenges of working within a culture that has deliberately distanced itself from Western influences, and the kind of future that lies ahead for the 500 residents of this threatened island.