Professor Hiʻilei Hobart Receives NAISA First Book Award

In May, YGSNA and NYU-Yale Sovereignty Project members attended the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) conference at the University of Toronto, St. George campus in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In conjunction with the conference, three publication awards were presented in the following categories: best first book, best subsequent book, and most thought-provoking article.  

YSGNA member and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Professor Hiʻilei Hobart received the First Book award for her recent publication, Cooling the Tropics: Ice Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment. The award honors first-time authors for the best first scholarly book published on any topic related to Native American and Indigenous Studies.

Published in December 2022, Hobart’s book charts the social history of ice in Hawai‘i, exposing how ice and refrigeration underpinned settler colonial ideas about race, environment, and the senses. As noted by Duke University Press, “By outlining how ice shaped Hawai‘i’s food system in accordance with racial and environmental imaginaries, Hobart demonstrates that thermal technologies can—and must—be attended to in struggles for food sovereignty and political self-determination in Hawaiʻi and beyond.”

Hobart’s book also received Duke University Press’s Scholars of Color First Book Award earlier in the year.