Post Doctoral Fellowship 2013-14, Day One

I have been asked by many people, what do you mean you are moving to Philadelphia for a year?" followed by, "are you teaching?" What exactly do you do on a post-doctoral fellowship?

The joke, as Director Dan Richter told the fellows this afternoon is that the McNeil Center on Early American Studies (MCEAS), likes to keep its fellows so busy that they can't do their own work. But, he confided that the opposite is actually the truth, that with a robust schedule of seminars, conferences and symposia, fellows end up writing more pages than less, and producing a lot more writing than one would imagine given their schedules. In a few weeks there is a three day graduate student conference to attend, seminars open to the public held every Friday, and road trip seminars at Princeton, in Boston, and out in Lancaster and Carlisle Pennsylvania. There is a Brown Bag Wednesday series of talks, as well as a seminar on race and empire that meets once a month.

This year is also a gift of time to the scholar to focus on reshaping and rewriting dissertations and book manuscripts. My manuscript focuses on early encounters between Hawaiians and transient and settler foreigners from 1790s - 1830s, and how these sometimes troubled relationships especially around sex inaugurate transformations in Hawaiian governance and law. My manuscript broadly suggests that Hawai'i should be incorporated into the U.S. survey much earlier than the overthrow in 1893. The historiography on the relationship between Hawai'i and U.S. is problematic----the way in which questions about Hawai'i and Hawaiian people have been framed, and the way histories of Hawai'i and the U.S. have developed by focusing solely on English language sources.

Chronology is important and should be paid attention to, if, for example Hawai'i is not incorporated into the U.S. survey until the overthrow----than, how can the actions and activities of American merchants, sailors, whalers and missionaries who played a large role in the direction of Hawaiian society over the course of the 19th century be understood. I am also, obviously, extremely interested in the lives of Hawaiian people, ali'i and maka'ainana during this period----especially since I think Hawaiians, like other peoples, deserve to have history---not as a luxury, but as a necessity.

My work draws upon the earliest published and written works in Hawaiian, kanawai (laws) and letters as well as the first depositions written in Hawaiian. It tracks the movement from kapu to kanawai during this period of the early 1800s, from oral to published law, even as it seeks to uncover the shape and practice of kapu, as well as the workings of chiefly governance in the 'aha 'olelo or chiefly council. The period from 1790-1830 remains under examined in contemporary indigenous scholarship for reasons we should consider as a community.

This year, I am happy to be supported by two post-doctoral fellowships, here at UPENN I am affiliated with the McNeil Center on Early American Studies and I am a member of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Race, Across Time and Space. I am also a recipient of the Mellon Funded Woodrow Wilson Minority Faculty Fellowship. I draw financial support from these Post-Doctoral Fellowships since I am on leave from the University of Hawai'i. Together these make for a generous stipend and I have also received some travel and housing assistance monies from UPENN. Travel will allow me to go home to visit family, but also continue research at home, as well as get me to conferences to present papers, and go to archives for research.

The best thing however, about being at UPENN are the amazing resources. This morning I got to meet the largest cohort that the McNeil Center has ever funded in one year. There are 25 scholars in house---four postdoctoral fellows and 21 dissertators, PhD candidates. The intellectual cohort is great, already three of us have agreed to meet to form a mini-writers group to keep ourselves on task with research and revisions. Our work is wide ranging from gender and sexuality to race and indigeneity, to the atlantic shipping and slave trade, body modification in early america and the materiality of books and texts. Clearly, I could go on and on. There is even another postdoctoral fellow writing about Hawai'i.

The fellows met this afternoon at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library located in the Van Pelt Library at UPENN. There we met five curators and librarians, and I found out that rather than ship a pile of books from Hawai'i which would cost me money, I could ask the librarian in charge of U.S. History to purchase the books for their collection. In this way, according to my lovely colleague, Professor Alice Te Punga Somerville, I will be leaving a trace, and a contribution to their library of books in an area of study that the UPENN library is currently lacking, namely books on Hawai'i and the Pacific. UPENN is not strapped for cash when it comes to buying books or manuscripts or resources for their libraries. Today I was also informed that we could order 50 pages of microfilm to be printed for us---whenever and as often as we wanted to---at no charge.

So one of the benefits of being at UPENN is taking advantage of the enormous library, its archival holdings and the expertise of librarians, archivists and curators, even beyond the university itself. Tomorrow we have two meetings scheduled, one at the Library Company of Philadelphia, and another at the Historical Society of Philadelphia. Friday's seminar is being held 45 minutes out of town at the David Library of the American Revolution.

When I collect material on Hawai'i all the way out here in Philadelphia, that broadens our horizons for materials about Hawai'i, and Hawai'i and the U.S. I am able to facilitate the movement of texts from the Atlantic to the Pacific again, and make this information available to more people through my written work, and in my courses. Often the materials I am able to gather are unavailable at UH Manoa, since UH cannot afford to pay the yearly expensive rate for this or that catalog. Here, for example, I can access a digital library of American Newspapers well into the 19th century, something I cannot do through my home library.

What am I doing this year? I'm writing and researching and translating. I'm missing my very supportive 'ohana and support network of aunties, uncles, colleagues and halau brothers and sisters and friends at home. I will do my best.  'o au me ke aloha e ka Hawai'i 'imi loa.