Ashanti Shih
Ashanti Shih earned a B.A. in History and Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley (2011) and a Ph.D. in History from Yale University (2019). Her work focuses on race, colonial science, and the environment in the twentieth-century Pacific and U.S. West. Shih teaches topics in Asian American history, environmental history, and the history of colonial science.
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 book Invasive Ecologies: Settler Colonial Science and Preservation in Hawai‘i’s National Parks (University of Washington Press, forthcoming 2027) 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. Her other work appears in History of Science, Historical Studies of Natural Sciences, Pacific Historical Review, Plant Humanities (Harvard University Press, 2026), and Nature Unfurled: Asian American Environmental Histories (University of Washington Press, 2024).
Shih is active in the Plant Humanities and related public history work, including collaborating with botanical gardens and herbaria on their interpretive materials. As a Sinnott Fellow with Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum, Shih is working on a reparative history project to investigate the arboretum's relationship to imperialism in East Asia.
Departments and Programs
Courses
HIST 104 - Asian American History
HIST 241 - Asian American Women and Gender History
HIST 300 - Thesis Preparation
Selected Publications
Book
Shih, Ashanti. Invasive Ecologies: Settler Colonial Science and Preservation in Hawai’i's National Parks. University of Washington Press, forthcoming 2027.
Peer-Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters
Shih, Ashanti. “Collecting ‘Queer’ Specimens: Settler Colonial Botany and Invisible Labor in Early Twentieth-Century Hawai‘i.” Pacific Historical Review. Forthcoming 2027. 24 pages.
Shih, Ashanti. “Herbarium as Living Archive.” In Plant Humanities, ed. by Yota Batsaki and Anatole Tchikine. Harvard University Press, 2027.
Shih, Ashanti. “Unruly Floods, Healing Waters: Chinese Settlers and the Los Angeles River, 1870s-1930s.” In Nature Unfurled: Asian American Environmental Histories, ed. by Connie Y. Chiang, 93-117. Seattle, WA.: University of Washington Press, 2024.
Shih, Ashanti. “Talking Story with the Archives.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, vol. 53, no. 1 (February 2023): 102-105. https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.1.102.
Shih, Ashanti. “‘The Most Perfect Natural Laboratory in the World’: Making and Knowing Hawaii National Park.” History of Science 57, no. 4 (December 2019): 493-517. https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275319848966.
Grants, Fellowships, Honors, Awards
Ashanti Shih is a 2023 Sinnott Award recipient
Ashanti Shih, Assistant Professor of History, is a 2023 Sinnott Award recipient. Ashanti’s scholarly work, which brings issues of race and indigeneity into dialogue with histories of science and environment, will focus on the colonial histories and legacies of the Arboretum’s vast collections of temperate woody plants from North America and East Asia.
