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.
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 1st, 3rd, and 5th Tuesday of each month from 4-5pm EST on WESU, Middletown, CT (listen online while the show airs: www.wesufm.org). The show has aired since February 2007, and is syndicated on nine Pacifica-affiliate stations – airing across ten US-states. 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: Decolonizing Native Histories, Ed. Florencia E. Mallon; Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation, Eds. Neferti Tadiar, and Angela Y. Davis; and Asian American Studies After Critical Mass, Ed. Kent Ono. Her work also appears in the following journals: South Atlantic Quarterly, 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. In May 2009, she was elected as a member of the inaugural council for a three year term that ends on the last day of the June 2012 annual meeting, which will be held at the Mohegan Tribal Nation’s reservation.
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