Ohio State nav bar

Liza K. Williams Public Lecture

williams
February 12, 2016
All Day
Smith Lab 1009

"Cultural Intimacies in Paradise: Desire, Commodification, and the Native Body in Contemporary Hawaiʻi"

Liza Keānuenueokalani Williams is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholar born in Honolulu and raised in Waimānalo on the island of Oʻahu in Hawaiʻi.  Liza received her BA in Psychology and two minors in Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2008.  She completed her PhD in American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University in May 2015.  Her dissertation is titled, "The Politics of Paradise: Tourism, Image, and Cultural Production in Hawaiʻi," which explores the colonial legacies, cultural politics and economic links between tourism, the military, and the prison industrial complex.  She analyzes how these industries shape intersecting neocolonial effects on Kānaka Maoli.  Liza was a Mellon-Hawaiʻi Doctoral Fellow during the 2014-2015 academic year, which supported her dissertation writing and its completion.  During the 2015-2016 academic year, Liza is conducting research in Hawaiʻi and revising her dissertation for a book manuscript as a UC Berkeley Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Ethnic Studies department.  Liza collaborates with the feminist collective Hinemoana of Turtle Island, writes poetry, and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.