New faculty member in Arts: Dr. Leah Kuragano

Wed. Oct. 19, 2022

Congratulations to our new faculty members in the Faculty of Arts! We look forward to introducing each of them to you in the coming weeks.

New for this year, we’re inviting each of our new faculty members to answer one of three questions:

1. What course are you most looking forward to teaching at UWinnipeg – and why?
2. What was one thing you learned as an undergraduate that was/has been really important to you – and why?
3. If you’ve come from elsewhere, what are/were you most interested in checking out in Winnipeg – or Manitoba?

Here we feature Dr. Leah Kuragano, Assistant Professor in the History Department.

Welcome Dr. Kuragano and thank you for sharing about yourself with us!

Dr. Leah Kuragano, History

Dr. Leah Kuragano's current project is a study of American settler colonialism that focuses on the contentious political relationship between the U.S. and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians).

Photo credit: Jeremy Kuzemchak (2021)

Dr. Leah Kuragano is an interdisciplinary historian of the twentieth-century United States and Pacific Worlds, specializing in the study of knowledge, indigeneity, settler colonialism, race, and popular culture. She was born in Japan but raised as a diasporic daughter in the eastern United States, mostly on the unceded ancestral lands of the Susquehannock and Lenape peoples (Pennsylvania). She received her B.A. at Bennington College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies from William & Mary. Her current project, Colonial Apprehension: Hawaiian Indigeneity in U.S. American Popular Culture, is a study of American settler colonialism that focuses on the contentious political relationship between the U.S. and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) as seen through the lens of three pieces of American popular culture: surfing, tiki culture, and Hawaii Five-O. Her research interests also include histories of Asian diaspora and racialization, especially as these are entangled with the politics of indigeneity and U.S. settler colonialism.

What course are you most looking forward to teaching at UWinnipeg – and why? 

One of my greatest joys and most important responsibilities as a teacher is to guide students through the often-uneasy process of challenging certainties they did not even know they held. I find that the study of U.S. history is as much about “unlearning” what we know as it is about gaining new knowledge. Of course, teaching U.S. history at the University of Winnipeg requires a slightly different approach to the one I might take in the United States with mostly American students. A lot of students who grew up in Canada and beyond will not have high-school-level familiarity with the dominant historical narrative of the United States. Nevertheless, U.S. culture, history, and politics has a global reach! Students at UWinnipeg will likely know a lot of stories about America and Americans, perhaps without even realizing it. I’m especially excited to teach courses on U.S. popular culture as well as histories of race, indigeneity, and settler colonialism in the U.S. context. I think that any student at UWinnipeg would benefit from a deeper and more critical understanding of these topics, and I encourage all students to enroll in one of my courses!

We're pleased to welcome Dr. Kuragano as a faculty member in the History Department. We look forward to hearing more about her research and opportunities to learn (and unnlearn) about the history of Canada's important neighbour and its people.