Leanne Day, Associate Professor of English
Associate Professor Day’s research primarily examines settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific, thinking through the processes of racialization and U.S. empire through contemporary cultural representation.
Posted Aug. 7, 2024.
Leanne Day is an associate professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. Her areas of expertise are in settler colonialism, Asian American studies, Pacific Islander studies, and ethnic studies.
Born and raised on Oʻahu, Day received her master of arts and doctor of philosophy, both in English with a focus on literature, from the University of Washington in Seattle. She was the inaugural Daniel K. Inouye postdoctoral fellow at UH Mānoa, and did her postdoc at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., where she helped build an Asian American and Pacific Islander studies program.
A scholar in Indigenous and postcolonial literatures of the Pacific, Day started teaching at UH Hilo in 2019 based at UH Hilo’s Department of English and won the prestigious UH System Frances Davis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2023. She received tenure in 2024.
- Newest professor in UH Hilo English department comes back home to teach Pacific Islander literature (UH Hilo Stories, Oct. 24, 2019)
- Leanne Day, UH Hilo scholar in Indigenous and postcolonial literatures of the Pacific, receives UH System award for teaching (UH Hilo Stories, May 31, 2023)
Research focus: Racialization and U.S. empire through contemporary cultural representation
Day’s research primarily examines settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific.
“I am interested in thinking through the processes of racialization and U.S. empire through contemporary cultural representation,” she says. “While I primarily focus on the Pacific, I am also invested in continental forms of Asian racialization, transpacific migration, and global Indigeneity.”
Day says she advocates for the necessity of interrogating the popular label Asian American Pacific Islander or AAPI, noting its myriad of iterations. She also advocates for critical conversation on the way Asian American histories, experiences, and representation tend to dominate cultural discourses in ways that omit Pacific Islanders. She has published a paper on this topic, “‘Asian American and Pacific Islander’ Studies in Boston and Hilo: Student Activism, Radical Imaginings, and Critical Ethnic Studies” (Western American Literature, 2022). And her thoughts on the topic were recently included in a story published on the AARP website, “Where to Celebrate AANHPI Heritage Month 2024” (April 30, 2024).
In addition, Day just finished a chapter on AAPI for a forthcoming high school textbook on Asian American studies with Gibbs Smith Education.
Since coming to UH Hilo, Day also has been working on and revising a book manuscript, Let Hawaiʻi Happen: “Local” Asian and Kanaka Maoli Narratives of Liberal Empire and Settler Colonialism. “My book examines a genealogy of race, settler colonialism, Indigeneity, and U.S. empire through the 19th century to the contemporary moment through juxtaposing historical archives and contemporary cultural representation,” she says.
Day also has published multiple articles that take up a range of topics including place-based pedagogy and the legal ambiguities around “undocumented” hotel workers in Hawaiʻi’s hospitality industry. On this topic, she has contributed a paper, “‘This is Paradise’: Transpacific Labor, Indigeneity, and ‘Undocumented’ in Hawaiʻi’s Hospitality Industry,” to the book, Transpacific, Undisciplined (Aug. 2024). The book is a collection of papers by scholars that resist “geopolitical binaries to emphasize relations between peoples and populations who have long navigated imperial binds,” as described by the publishers.
In addition to working on her manuscript, Day also is writing an article for a special issue publication edited by UH Hilo Professor of Philosophy Celia Bardwell-Jones. “The article reflects on the late Haunani-Kay Trask’s work in my own research trajectory as well as in the various classrooms I have taught in throughout the continental United States and in Hawaiʻi,” says Day.
“Inspired by the experiences of my students”
Day’s teaching areas focus on settler colonialism, empire, Hawai‘i, Asian American studies, and the Pacific through literary and cultural studies. She teaches upper-division topics in Pacific Islands literature, literature of Hawai‘i, Asian American literature, and speculative fiction. She also teaches a range of 200-level courses on topics such as literature of human rights, Hawaiʻi in film, introduction to the literary genre of popular fiction, and an introductory class on rhetoric.
Associate Professor Day says it’s a dream to be back in Hawai‘i teaching contemporary Indigenous literatures of Oceania to the diverse student body at UH Hilo. She says she is constantly inspired by her students and often teaches texts that she is also analyzing in her own work.
“I have been really inspired by the experiences of my students as they engage with Pacific and Hawaiʻi literature by Indigenous writers as well as the ways in which they build on their own experiences in order to create connections with cultural texts,” she says. “While I am not surprised per say by this, it has inspired me to critically engage with place-based pedagogy both in the classroom and in my research.”
She notes her students have been moderators for a national conference on children’s literature, where they facilitated panels and led discussions with conference participants.
“The various service and community work my students engage in have facilitated significant conversations about the relationships between the university and our community that I hope to develop for an article at a later point,” says Day.
She also plans to move onto another research topic that deals with undocumented immigrants, transracial adoption, and Indigenous kinship.
By Susan Enright, a public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of Keaohou and UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.
