Alani Fujii

Alani Fujii is a Black and Japanese doctoral student in American Studies and a Dean’s Emerging Scholar Fellow. She is interested in the relationship between race and indigeneity, specifically Blackness and Pasifika indigeneities, and how they interact in movements towards indigenous sovereignty. Largely, she is interested in what generative space exists when Blackness and indigeneity are co-conspirators towards building alternative futures. She focuses on poetics, affect, and speculative literature, and is interested in how these translate to on-the-ground applications, such as farming education and land-back efforts.

She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Barnard College cum laude 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, South Pacific until 2020. Before coming to Yale, Alani was working as an administrative officer at the National Institutes of Health.