PhD candidate Lokeilani Kaimana wins Five College Pre-Dissertation Fellowship

PhD candidate Lokeilani Kaimana won and accepted the Five College Pre-Dissertation Fellowship for the 2014-15 academic year. The program "supports scholars from under-represented groups and histories whose engagement in the Academy will enrich scholarship and teaching.” –Five College Consortium.

“I'm pleased to be one of four fellows named for the upcoming year,” said Kaimana, who will be in residence at Smith College as the Mendenhall Fellow in Film Studies.

Currently a visiting lecturer at Smith College, Kaimana’s research interests include queer cinema and media lineages, contemporary screen theory, queer-of-color critique, and the contingencies of racialized embodiment and screen images. Her dissertation, Visual Experiments in Speculative Cinema, focuses on contemporary women-of-color artists Shu Lea Cheang, Julie Dash, Cheryl Dunye, and Tina Takemoto, whose critical reception, she argues, has largely been limited by identity categories.

“I critique this reception and read their works—in film, video, new media, cyberspace, and filmed performance— through interviews with the artists and queer-of-color theory. These artworks, forged in radical strategies for survival, subvert filmic conventions historically linked to oppressive power and instead offer speculative proof of other pasts and possible futures.”

The fellowship, which will provide support to complete the dissertation, includes a $30,000 stipend, a research grant, health benefits, office space, housing assistance, and library privileges at all five campuses belonging to the consortium.

She will teach one course in the spring semester of 2015 titled "Authorship and Women-of Color Filmmakers."