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June 4, 2007

Stacy Kamehiro awarded President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities

By Scott Rappaport (831) 459-2496; srapp@ucsc.

History of art and visual culture assistant professor Stacy Kamehiro has been awarded a UC President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities grant of $25,000.

Kamehiro joined the UCSC faculty in 2002. Her research concentrates on the visual cultures of Oceania and centers on the relationship between art production and identity politics, particularly in situations of culture contact and colonization. Her work is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on historical, anthropological, and cultural theories and methodologies.

Kamehiro is currently studying public art and art institutions in late 19th-century Hawai'i. She plans to use the fellowship in support of her project, "Collections, Exhibitions, and Colonial Culture in 19th-Century Hawai'i."

“Through published images and accounts, as well as travel, Native Hawaiians were familiar with the ways Western museums, states, and individuals collected and displayed Oceanic and other colonial possessions as specimens, commodities, and curiosities,” said Kamehiro. “Hawaiians also observed how European and American exhibits of their own national trade, arts, and manufactures promoted allegories of progress and empire. I am interested in how--as Native Hawaiians constructed collections and exhibitions--their conceptions of culture, history, and science intersected with Euro-American (inter)nationalist discourses, and how they also wielded the collection to resist Western characterizations of 'other' cultures.”

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