Doctoral Student in History
About
Lopaka is a historian of the Pacific with broad interests in social, political, and environmental approaches to the histories of property formation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His current research focuses on indigenous and colonial articulations of property in and around military enclosures in Hawai'i and the Marshall Islands from c. 1940-c. 1990, including the history of genealogy-as-property and the politics of anthropological translation in US colonial contexts. He has published in the Journal of Pacific History on Refaluwasch migrations to and from Guahan during the late nineteenth century, and has researched the intersections of incarceration, counterinsurgency, and colonial state-building during the US occupation of the Philippines (1898-c. 1910).
He comes to Ann Arbor from Hilo, Hawai'i, by way of St. Louis, Missouri, where he (allegedly) earned a BA in History and Economics from Washington University.
In his free time, Lopaka likes to fill out bios and write about himself in the third-person.
Publication
"Autonomy, Mobility, and Identity: The Re Tamuning of Guam, 1869-1901," The Journal of Pacific History 56 no. 4 (2021): 415-36. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2021.1953379
