FELLOWS

Post-doctoral Fellows

D.Noelani Manuela Arista, Department of History, University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Noelani Arista is an Assistant Professor of Hawaiian-U.S. History at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa. She received her PhD in American History from Brandeis University in 2010. A Kanaka Maoli Historian, Dr. Arista's work focuses on transformations in Hawaiian law and governance from 1790-1840. She has developed historical methodologies shaped by her work on early nineteenth century Hawaiian-Euro-American cross cultural encounters. She has most recently developed a graduate course on research in Hawaiian language archives. Her translations have appeared in Ka Ho’oilina, and ‘Oiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal. Her essays are published in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Biography, the PMLA, and Anglistica.

Lyra D. Monteiro, Department of History, Rutgers-Newark

Lyra D. Monteiro is an Assistant Professor in the History and American Studies programs at Rutgers University-Newark. She received her PhD from Brown University’s interdisciplinary program in Archaeology and the Ancient World in 2012, and specializes in public humanities, early United States history, and race and ethnic identity. Dr. Monteiro has worked on curatorial, education, and development projects for over a dozen museums and cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, El Museo del Barrio, and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. She also co-directs The Museum On Site, a public art project that aims to help people understand their worlds through site-specific, free public experiences that share ideas and information in accessible and stimulating ways. During her year as a Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow, she will be working on her manuscript, which addresses the politics of history in the context of the early United States, focusing on objects, spaces, and performances associated with Classical antiquity during the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War.

Pre-doctoral Fellows

Lynne Feeley is a doctoral candidate at Duke University in the Department of English. Her dissertation, Ground Plans, explores discourses of nature and race in the antebellum United States. With chapters on Harriet Jacobs, David Walker, Lydia Maria Child, and Emily Dickinson, her project examines how marginalized groups generated concepts we now call “ecological” and how their concepts challenged the dominant discourses of nature used to maintain the social order. Her essay “Plants and the Problem of Authority in the Antebellum U.S. South” is forthcoming in Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies.

Mairin Odle is a Ph.D. candidate in Atlantic History at New York University. She is particularly interested in Native American history, histories of the body, and race, gender, and personal identity in early America. Her dissertation, “Stories Written on the Body: Cross-Cultural Markings in the North American Atlantic,” explains how cross-cultural encounters in early America could permanently physically alter individuals - by scalping, tattooing, or branding their bodies - and explores the creation and circulation of stories and images of such marked bodies.