Hiʻilei Hobart

Hiʻilei Hobart's picture
Assistant Professor

Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli) is Assistant Professor of Native and Indigenous Studies at Yale University. An interdisciplinary scholar, she researches and teaches on issues of settler colonialism, environment, and Indigenous sovereignty. Her first book, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Duke University Press, 2022) is the recipient of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Best First Book Prize, the Scholars of Color First Book Award from Duke University Press, the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize from the Yale University Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), and received an honorable mention for the Lara Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association (ASA).

Hobart’s articles have appeared in refereed journals such as NAIS, Media+Environment, Food, Culture, and Society, and The Journal of Transnational American Studies, among others. Her article “At Home on the Mauna: Ecological Violence and Fantasies of Terra Nullius on Maunakea’s Summit,” received the 2020 NAISA prize for “Most Thought-Provoking Article” in the field of Native and Indigenous Studies. She is the co-editor of the special issue “Radical Care,” for Social Text (2020) and editor of the special issue “Foodways of Hawaiʻi” for Food, Culture, and Society (2016), which was republished as an edited volume for Routledge (2018).

Her current projects include the forthcoming co-edited special issue “We Are Not American, Still,” for American Quarterly and a manuscript about Native Hawaiian dispossession, settler colonial leisure practices, and the 20th century expansion and development of the Hawaiʻi State Parks System. She has recently published towards her new book project with short essays for Parapraxis and The Avery Review.

Professor Hobart holds a PhD in Food Studies from New York University, an MA in Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture from the Bard Graduate Center, and an MLS in Rare Books Librarianship and Archives Management from the Pratt Institute. She joined Yale from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Hobart currently serves as the co-chair of the Nominations Committee for NAISA. She also sits on the Editorial Boards of the NAIS, Food, Culture, and Society, and Critical Ethnic Studies journals. 

Oceania, Hawaiʻi, food, Indigenous politics, public space, environment, settler colonialism, ethnic studies