Doctoral Candidate in History
About
Lopaka is a historian of the Pacific with broad interests in economic, social, political, and environmental approaches to the history of property formation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His dissertation project centers on the archives of applied anthropology in the US-administered, UN-sanctioned Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands to tell a history of indigenous and colonial property formation at two overlapping historical depths: on one hand, the history of translating and negotiating property around (thermo)nuclear "test" sites and sites of exile between Marshallese interlocutors, anthropologists, and other colonial officials from c. 1940-1980; on the other, the longue duree history of how the nineteenth-century emergence of the copra complex informed, prefigured, and constrained the spatial formations of US nuclear colonialism beginning in the mid-twentieth century. 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
