Meet Makanani Salā!

The UCI Humanities Center welcomes Makanani Salā, doctoral student in History and the graduate research assistant for the Center for Medical Humanities. With support from the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Medical Humanities will be sponsoring a year-long exploration on "Suffer Well."

Makanani is a second-year PhD student in the History Department of the UCI School of Humanities. Her current research focuses on projects of Native Hawaiian racial rehabilitation in the early twentieth century. She received both undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa at the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies, where her thesis examined processes of blood quantum certification and codification through the use of vital statistics certificates. In her leisure time, Makanani keeps busy as a Kumu Hula (practitioner of traditional Native Hawaiian dance) and as a mother to her three children.