Adria L. Imada is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, where she also teaches in its medical humanities program. Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, she now lives on the homelands of the Acjachemen and Tongva people. Imada’s first book, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire, won four awards, including the 2013 Lawrence W. Levine Award for best cultural history from the Organization of American Historians. Imada’s second book, An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin: Disability and Life-Making during Medical Incarceration, explores the prolific visual culture of kinship and disability.
Imada’s research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies’ Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship and the National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine biomedicine grant.
Her project, “Surviving Epidemics: A Hidden History,” examines diverse survivors of 20th-century epidemics in the United States and its colonies.
