Alani Fujii

Alani Fujii is a Black and Japanese doctoral candidate in American Studies. Her dissertation studies Hawaiʻi’s racial formations through the intersection of nineteenth-century U.S. Reconstruction and Hawaiʻi sugar plantation development. She is interested in the relationship between Blackness and Indigeneity, and how they interact in movements towards Indigenous sovereignties.  What keeps her up at night is thinking about the generative spaces that exist when reparation and land-back efforts are co-conspirators in dreaming relational theories of change, and how that then translates to mutual aid and other direct action. 

For AY 2025-2026, she is a Visiting Colleague in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Her work has been generously supported by the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM), the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), and the Yale Dean’s Emerging Scholar Fellowship.

She received her BA from Barnard College in Urban Studies with a minor in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in 2019. She is a former Peace Corps volunteer who taught English in the Kingdom of Tonga. Before coming to Yale, Alani was working as an Administrative Officer at the National Institutes of Health.

Please reach out if you are interested in talking about the program, doing a PhD, or any of the aforementioned things.