Visiting Scholars

Nadia Kanagawa is an Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and History at Furman University in Greenville, SC. She researches how the seventh- through ninth-century Japanese rulers approached the incorporation, assimilation and configuration of immigrants and their descendants. She is the author of “East Asia’s First World War, 643-668,” in East Asia in the World: Twelve Events That Shaped the Modern International Order, and “Approach and Be Transformed: Immigrants in the Nara and Heian State” in Hapa Japan: Constructing Global Mixed Race and Mixed Roots Japanese Identities and Representations. She is currently completing a manuscript, “Transforming the People: Foreign Subjects in Seventh- Through Ninth-Century Japan.”

Michael Masatsugu is Associate Professor of History at Towson University.  His research examines the reconstitution of Japanese American Buddhist communities and the rise of world Buddhist social movements during the Cold War.  His work has been published in Amerasia, Journal of Global History and Pacific Historical Review.  Heis currently completing a manuscript, “Reorienting the Pure Land:  Ethnicity, Transnationalism and Orientalism in Japanese American Buddhism, 1944-1974.”

Greg Robinson is Professor of History at l’Université du Québec À Montréal. A specialist in North American Ethnic Studies and U.S. Political History, he has written several notable books, including By Order of the President: (Harvard UP, 2001) which uncovers President Franklin Roosevelt’s central involvement in the wartime confinement of 120,000 Japanese Americans, and A Tragedy of Democracy: (Columbia UP, 2009), winner of the 2009 AAAS History book prize, which studies Japanese American and Japanese Canadian confinement in transnational context. His book After Camp: (UC Press, 2012), winner of the Caroline Bancroft History Prize, centers on post war resettlement.

Visiting Scholar, 2012-2013
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Jane H. Yamashiro’s research examines the construction of Japaneseness and Japanese identity in multiple social and historical contexts, particularly in terms of race and ethnicity. Her work has focused on Japanese American transnational migrants from Hawai‘i and the US continent in Tokyo, looking at the ways in which their ambiguous social positioning in Japan reveals complex processes of social categorization, racialization, and stratification in Japanese society. Other research interests include comparative immigration policies targeting co-ethnics, Japan’s diaspora strategies, and global and transnational structures of race. Her articles have been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies; AAPI Nexus Journal: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Policy, Practice and Community; Sociology Compass, Migrations and Identities, and CR: The New Centennial Review. She is currently working on a book titled Negotiating Global Constructions of Race and Ethnicity: Japanese American Transnational Identity Formation in Tokyo. Her next project, From Hapa to Haafu: Multiracial Japanese Americans in Japan, explores the construction of multiracial Japanese identities from a global perspective.