Her areas of expertise include governance, colonial and indigenous history, translation and research in Hawaiian language archives. Her dissertation, "Histories of Unequal Measure: Euro-American Encounters With Hawaiian Governance and Law 1793-1827," won the prestigious Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians for the best dissertation written on an American Subject in 2010. Last year Professor Arista was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania (UPENN) at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Her research has been supported by fellowship from the Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Native American Program at Dartmouth University.