Ashanti Shih

Ashanti Shih was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. She completed her B.A. in History and Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley in 2011 and earned her Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 2019. Before arriving at Vassar, Shih held a predoctoral Mellon Fellowship at the New York Botanical Garden’s Humanities Institute, a postdoctoral fellowship in the University of Southern California’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Environmental Studies at Wellesley College.

Shih is a historian of the twentieth-century Pacific and U.S. West. Her research and teaching spans Asian American history, Native Pacific and Indigenous studies, U.S. empire, environmental history, and the history of colonial science. Her work focuses on the socio-political aspects of colonial botany, ecology, preservation, and conservation. This includes exploring diverse relationships to nature and marginalized environmental knowledges among Asian Americans and Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians). Her first book project, tentatively titled “Invasive Ecologies: Science, Preservation, and Settler Colonialism in Twentieth-Century Hawai‘i,” uses the case of the U.S. National Park system in Hawai‘i to explore issues of species belonging, natural and cultural preservation, and Kanaka Maoli and Asian settler engagements with American science. This project is based on her dissertation, which received several awards: the American Society for Environmental History’s Rachel Carson Prize, the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association’s W. Turrentine Jackson Award, and Yale University’s Edwin W. Small Prize.

Shih is active in public history work, including collaborating with botanical gardens and herbaria on their interpretive materials. She is currently a Sinnott Fellow with Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum, where she is working on a reparative history project to investigate the arboretum's relationship to imperialism in East Asia.