Noelani Arista

Dr. Noelani Arista is assistant professor of Hawaiian and U.S. History at University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa. Her research and writing centers on translation and research in Hawaiian language archives focusing on governance, the practice of history and a more recent focus on mele (songs.) Above all she finds peace in practice, using the search engines of online digital archives to refine methods of approach to bringing order and organization to Hawaiian systems of knowledge. She is the founder of the facebook group 365 days of aloha which seeks to reconfigure our approaches to a subject that is overused yet little understood and foster healing and a sense of completion back to community. Her dissertation, “Histories of Unequal Measure: Euro-American Encounters With Hawaiian Governance and Law, 1793-1827,” won the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians for the best dissertation written on an American subject in 2010, and will be published by Penn Press. In 2013-14, Professor Arista was a post-doctoral fellow in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. My URL at UH manoa: http://manoa.hawaii.edu/history/people/faculty/arista/