“The Education of Romanzo Adams: Students as Scholars at UH, 1920-1941.”

February 21, 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Manoa Campus, Henke Hall 325

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The archives of the University of Hawai‘i hold a remarkable collection of work – papers, interviews, maps and other ephemera – generated by student researchers in Sociology classes. Organized as the Romanzo Adams Social Research Laboratory (RASRL) collection, this material is a unique set of documents focused on the growth and development of local culture during the early Territorial Era.

Working with faculty (Romanzo Adams, Andrew Lind, Bernard Hormann, and Clarence Glick) and graduate students (Margaret Lam, Yukiko Kimura, Dolores Lorden Glick), undergraduates were dispersed throughout the Territory to research and write about the local community. Some of this work was edited and published in Social Process in Hawai‘i; much more was saved and contributed to the research and publications of scholars in Hawai‘i and the mainland.

In this presentation we will feature some of the unpublished student research from the 1930s. Although it is raw and unedited, their work offers an unmediated depiction of Hawai‘i during the pre-war Territorial years from the vantage point of the children of immigrants, kama‘āina, and new arrivals encountering the multicultural communities of Hawai‘i for the first time.

Christine Kirk-Kuwaye received a bachelor’s and master’s in English and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Hawai‘i. She has taught in various UHM departments, served as an academic advisor for Arts & Sciences, and recently retired from her position as a faculty specialist in UHM’s Student Life and Development.

Lori Pierce is Associate Professor of American Studies at DePaul University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Hawai‘i in American Studies. Her most recent work is an article on the Miss Kapalapa contest in the anthology War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2013).

Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Manoa Campus

More Information
956-3774, biograph@hawaii.edu, http://www.facebook.com/CBRHawaii

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