J. Kēhaulani Kauanui is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology.  She earned her PhD in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2000.  She earned her B.A. (Honors) in Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 1992.

Professor Kauanui is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and has held fellowships from: the School of Advanced Research (formerly the School of American Research), the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, Rockefeller Archives Center, National Science Foundation, Fulbright (Maori Studies, University of Auckland), and Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury. In Fall 2013, she will begin her 3-year appointment as an Organization of American Historians (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer.

Kauanui’s first book is Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Duke University Press, 2008).   Her second book project (in-progress), Thy Kingdom Come? The Paradox of Hawaiian Sovereignty, is a critical study on gender and sexual politics and the question of Hawaiian indigeneity in relation to state-centered Hawaiian nationalism.

She is the sole producer and host of a public affairs radio program, “Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond,”  which airs on the 2nd and 4th Friday of each month from 1-2pm EST on WESU, Middletown, CT. The show is widely syndicated on the following stations: KUCR in Riverside, CA; WAZU, Peoria, IL; KRFP, in Moscow, ID; WETX-LP, Tri-Cities region of TN, VA, and NC; WNJR, in Washington, PA; WGDR/WGDH, Plainfield, VT; WJSC, Johnson, VT; WPCR, Plymouth, NH; and WBCR, Great Barrington, MA.
Past episodes are archived online: www.indigenouspolitics.com.

Additionally, she is a member of The Dream Committee, a radio collective that produces a program called Horizontal Power Hour (also on WESU), which features anarchist culture, politics, and philosophies.  That show airs on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month from 4-5pm EST (listen online while the show airs: www.wesufm.org).

Her essays appear in the following edited books: Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States: A Sourcebook, Eds. Amy Den Ouden and Jean M. O’Brien (forthcoming, University of North Carolina press, forthcoming 2013); Decolonizing Native Histories, Ed. Florencia E. Mallon (Duke University Press, 2011); Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation, Eds. Neferti Tadiar, and Angela Y. Davis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Asian American Studies After Critical Mass, Ed. Kent Ono (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005).  Her work also appears in the following journals: South Atlantic Quarterly, The American Quarterly, Politica & Società, American Studies, Comparative American Studies, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, American Indian Quarterly, Amerasia Journal, Mississippi Review, The Contemporary Pacific, The Hawaiian Journal of History, `Oiwi: Native Hawaiian Journal, and Social Text.

Kauanui has also written on Hawaiian sovereignty politics for the Guardian UK, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Honolulu Advertiser, and The Honolulu Weekly.

Kauanui has co-edited three special issues of the following journals: “Women Writing Oceania: Weaving the Sails of the Waka,” Pacific Studies (2007) with Caroline Sinavaiana; “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge,” The Contemporary Pacific (2001) with Vicente M. Diaz; and “Migrating Feminisms,” Women’s Studies International Forum (1998) with Kalpana Ram.

She serves on the editorial boards of the following journals: Settler Colonial Studies; American Indian Quarterly; and Hulili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being; Also, from 2005-2010, she served as an editorial board member for Journal of Pacific History. Kauanui serves on the advisory boards of the following journals: Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; and Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific.  Additionally, she served on the editorial board for SAR Press from 2007-2009.

Kauanui also served as the 2008 President of the New England American Studies Association.

From 2005-2008, Kauanui was part of a six-person steering committee that worked to found the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).  From 2008-2009, she served as an acting council member.  From 2009-2012, she served as an  elected as a member of the inaugural council.

She was also recently elected to the national council of the American Studies Association (2013-2016).

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