Lisa Uperesa
Associate Professor
Areas of Interest:
Phone: (310) 206-1690
Email: Uperesa@asianam.ucla.edu
Office:3330 Rolfe Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095
Biography
Associate Professor Lisa Uperesa works with Pacific communities to understand movement and mobility, and how they shape lives, identities, families, cultures, and futures. Her past research focused on the rise of American football in Samoan communities and the navigation of sport as both labor and tautua (service). Current research projects include the globalization of Māori haka through sporting routes and digital platforms, Native mascots in Indigenous and multi-ethnic communities, decolonial and culturally sustaining pedagogies, and mapping Pacific Research Methodologies. She previously served as Head of Pacific Studies and co-Head of School Te Wānanga o Waipapa | School of Māori Studies and Pacific Studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland. She has also had teaching and research appointments in ethnic studies and sociology at University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa; and in anthropology at Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, and Hoftstra University. She holds the Morgan and Helen Chu Endowed Chair in Asian American Studies and is proud to return to the University of California.
Education
Ph.D., Anthropology, Columbia University
M.A., M.Phil. Anthropology, Columbia University
B.A., Sociology and Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Research Interests
Mobilities, diaspora, and transnationalism; sport, gender, and community; colonialism and U.S. empire; and Indigenous knowledges and digital platformsPublications
• Gridiron Capital: How American Football Became a Samoan Game (Duke University Press, 2022)
• “Navigators for the New Millennium: Towards a View of the Modern Samoan Sport Diaspora” in the Handbook of Sport and Migration, edited by Joseph Maguire, Katie Liston, and Mark Falcous (Elgar Publishing, 2024)
• “Re-visioning Pacific Research Method/ologies” (with Marcia Leenen-Young) in Waka Kuaka: The Journal of the Polynesian Society Issue 132 (1/2)
• “Is it all a Dream? Global Movement and the Gossamer of ‘Globalization’” in Globalization: Past, Present, Future, edited by Manfred B. Steger, Roland Benedikter, Harold Pechlaner, and Ingrid Kofler (University of California Press, 2023)
• “Entangled Histories and Transformative Futures: Indigenous Sport in the 21st Century” in Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, edited by Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, and Steve Larkin (Routledge, 2021)
• “Training for Empire?: Samoa and American Gridiron Football” in Ethnographies of U.S. Empire, edited by John Collins and Carole McGranahan (Duke University Press, 2018)
• “Contested Sovereignties: Puerto Rico and American Samoa” in Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism across Indigenous Nations and Latinx America, edited by Frances Negron-Muntañer (University of Arizona Press, 2017)
• “Seeking New Fields of Labor: Football and Colonial Political Economies in American Samoa” in Formations of U.S. Colonialism, edited by Alyosha Goldstein (Duke University Press, 2014)
Awards
2024 Invited Participant, Wenner-Gren Symposium on Racialized Bodies, Athletic Experiences, Muñopedro, Spain
2023 Outstanding Book Award, North American Society for the Sociology of Sport
2023 Best First Book Award Finalist, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association
2023 University of Auckland Award for Sustained Teaching Excellence
2022 Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award
2022 University of Auckland Faculty of Arts Award for Sustained Teaching Excellence (Inaugural Dean’s Award: Overall Winner)
