Summer 2025

UHM History’s Summer Updates

Welcome back to another exciting year here at UH Mānoa!

Our faculty and students were active throughout this summer presenting at conferences, publishing journal articles, and exploring the world! Here’s what our faculty and students shared with us (and to pass along to you all!):

Professor Ned Bertz: “In June I attended the third Asia-Africa conference, titled ‘A New Axis of Knowledge,’ hosted by Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal. I presented a paper on research for my book in progress, ‘Everyday Dilemmas and Dreams of Freedom: Decolonization from the Margins in the Western Indian Ocean World.’ I also participated in a roundtable on the topic of ‘Exportable Epistemologies?: Reconsidering Colonial and Postcolonial Epistemes Framing Africa and Asia as Margins.’ Highlights included visiting the Island of Gorée and, in counterpoint, the African Renaissance Monument.”

Professor Monica LaBriola: “I travelled to Majuro, Marshall Islands with Dr. Foley Pfalzgraf (Outreach Director, Center for Pacific Islands Studies) and four graduate student alumnae of the Women in Pacific Studies (WiPS) Graduate Student Fellowship to present at the Vaka Pasifiki Education Conference. Three of the students were funded by the College of Arts, Languages & Letters (CALL) Elizabeth Spann Award.

Presentation title: Weaving Communities of Care: The UH Mānoa Women in Pacific Studies Graduate Student Fellowship, Perspectives from Micronesia Conference: Vaka Pasifiki Education Conference (VPEC), hosted by the Institute of Education (IOE) at the University of the South Pacific (USP).

Participants:

  • Dr. Monica C. LaBriola, Assistant Professor, Department of History and WiPS co-convener
  • Dr. Foley Pfalzgraf, Outreach Director, Center for Pacific Islands Studies, WiPS 2022 and WiPS co-convener
  • Elyssa Santos, PhD Student, History, WiPS 2025
  • Vicky Jade Lukan, MA Student, Pacific Islands Studies, WiPS 2024
  • Leiana S. A. Naholowaʻa, PhD Student, English, WiPS 2023
  • Ha’åni San Nicolas, Doctoral Candidate, Indigenous Politics, WiPS 2022″

Professor Mark McNally: “I went to Okinawa for two weeks in June, and I published an article in Histories at the end of July.”

Doctoral Student Ruizhi Choo: “In July, I presented virtually at the 27th International Congress for the History of Science and Technology (ICHST), in a roundtable session about ‘Reckoning with Scientific and Intergenerational Knowledge.’ I was the most junior scholar on a panel that included very experienced and respected academics like Faizah Zakaria (National University of Singapore) and Vicente Diaz (UCLA). My presentation, ‘Ghosts in the Archival Grain: Entangled Epistemic Processes in Malayan Fisheries’ was the first time I ‘played’ with my topic, thinking through the methodological implications of working with primarily colonial sources to talk about environmental and technological change in Southeast Asia.”

Doctoral Student SeungHyeon (Scott) Pyo: “I presented a paper titled ‘Epistemic Sutures: Where Nerves Speak in Borrowed Tongues; Translational Negotiations in Kaitai Shinsho’ at the 2025 World Congress of the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, hosted by the University of Birmingham.”

Master’s Candidate Duncan Brouwer: “This summer I applied to and was accepted to present my paper at the British Association for Chinese Studies Conference (BACS). I will be presenting a paper on a part of my research called “Social Transformation through Labor: Lida Xueyuan and Its Rural Education Department” at the BACS Conference on September 4th as a part of a panel called ‘Education in Question.’

I also had the opportunity to travel to China this summer as a part of the Young Envoys Scholarship Program where a group of graduate students and professors from the University of Hawaii had the opportunity to travel into the Yinshan Mountains to see the Yinshan Rock Paintings (陰山岩畫) (thank you to Dr. Jiang of East Asian Languages and Literature Department at UH!) . Some of these paintings/ carvings have been dated by experts to be over 10,000 years old and show the development of nomadic religious beliefs and practice over the course of the last deca-millennium. Although the meaning of most of the carvings was indecipherable to my untrained eye, with the petroglyphs being a far cry from my studies of modern Chinese history, to be on the Chinese northern frontier in Inner Mongolia, a region of central to the history of Imperial China for its characteristic nomadic/sedentary relations, was a privilege and an honor that gave my abstract studies of China and its large-scale developments a physical grounding. I also had the best lamb of my life en route.”

Photos submitted by our faculty and students’ travels can be viewed on Google Drive at the link here.