Susan Najita

Susan Najita is an Associate Professor jointly appointed in Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies in the Department of American Culture and the Department of English Language and Literatures.  She has written on a range of indigenous authors from the Pacific Islands in edited anthologies and articles appearing in journals suc as The Contemporary Pacific, ARIEL, and Cultural Critique. Her first book Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction (Routledge 2006) discussed the history of contact and colonization in the Pacific and how indigenous writers from Hawai‘i, Samoa, and Aotearoa / New Zealand creatively engage this traumatic history in their fictional works.  Her research interests include postcolonial and world literatures in English, Pacific literatures, Pacific Studies, Asian American Studies, psychological approaches, and Environmental approaches to literature.  She is currently writing a second book on the relation between private property and public domain in colonial formations in Hawai‘i, with particular focus on public lands.

Courses Taught

Undergraduate Courses

• Literatures of Hawai‘i
• Pacific Literary and Cultural Studies
• Pacific Island Worlds
• Green Indigeneities
• Environmental Literatures of Empire
• Literatures of U.S. Empire
• Introduction to Literary Studies
• Introduction to Asian Pacific American Literature

Graduate Courses

• Decolonization and the Environment (grad)
• Seminar in Critical Theory: Empire and Imperialism: Biopolitics and the Commons (grad)
• Postcolonial Dialogues: Literature and Theory
• Interdisciplinary Approaches to Trauma: Asian and Pacific Islanders
• U.S. Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures
• Pacific Literature