Since 1996 he has conducted research on Pacific Islands Christianity, with much of his fieldwork based in Fiji. From 2012 to 2016, he held an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship for research on indigenous Christian theologies for which he conducted new research in Samoa, American Samoa, and New Zealand. He is the author of Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance (Oxford, 2014) and In God’s Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity (California, 2009), as well as the coeditor of several volumes including The Monologic Imagination (with Julian Millie, Oxford, 2017), New Mana: Transformations of a Classic Concept in Pacific Languages and Cultures (with Ty P. Kāwika Tengan, ANU, 2016), and Christian Politics in Oceania (with Debra McDougall, Berghahn, 2012).