Noelani Arista

Denise Noelani Manuela Arista is an associate professor of Hawaiian and US History in the Department of History at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her scholarship focuses on 19th century American History, Hawaiian History and Literature, Indigenous epistemology and translation, and Colonial and Indigenous history and historiography. Arista was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi and she graduated from the Kamehameha Schools in 1986. She received both her BA (1992) and her MA (1998) in Hawaiian Religion from the Department of Religion at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. In 2010, she earned her PhD from the Department of History at Brandeis University. Arista’s dissertation, “Histories of Unequal Measure: Euro-American Encounters With Hawaiian Governance and Law, 1793-1827,” won the 2010 Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians for the “best-written doctoral dissertation on a significant subject in American history”. Arista was hired as an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in 2008. In 2013-14, Arista was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, Arista was promoted to associate professor of Hawaiian History at the University of Hawai’i.

Arista’s current research examines the cultural, legal, and political colonization of the Hawaiian Islands. She has published on prostitution in 19th century Hawai’i, the arrival of James Cook to the Hawaiian Islands, the appropriation of Hawaiian culture, the recording and transmission of Hawaiian history, and early Hawaiian publications and historians. She is a leading expert on Hawaiian historian and chiefly counsellor David Malo and is immersed within the community of Hawaiian scholars. Under the auspices of the University of Hawaiʻi Committee for the Preservation and Study of Hawaiian Language, Art, and Culture, Arista is a member of a team of University of Hawaiʻi researchers currently working to collect, understand, interpret, and translate mele Kanikau, Hawaiian grief chants and laments that were published in 19th century Hawaiian-language newspapers. Arista’s first book, The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawai’i and the Early United States, relates the experience of native Hawaiian encounters with colonialism during the early- to mid-nineteenth century. It was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2018.

Source