Eiichiro Azuma
Associate Professor of History
Eiichiro Azuma is Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies. He joined the Penn History faculty in January 2001. Professor Azuma specialized in Asian American history with an emphasis on Japanese American experiences, as well as emigration/immigration, modern Japanese history, and U.S.-Japan relations. At Penn, he primarily teaches courses on Asian Americans. He holds MA in Asian American Studies (1992) and Ph.D. in history (2000), both from University of California at Los Angeles.
Professor Azuma is author of Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford University Press, 2005), which won the Hiroshi Shimizu Book Award from the Japanese Association for American Studies, the Theodore Saloutos Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, and the Honorable Mention in the Frederick Jackson Turner Award by the Organization of American Historians. With Gordon H. Chang of Stanford University, he also co-edited Yuji Ichioka, Before Internment: Essays in Japanese American History (Stanford University Press, 2006). Azuma has published several academic articles, including those that won the 1994 Alexander Saxton History Award in the Amerasia Journal and the 1998 W, Turrentine Jackson Prize of the Pacific Coast Branch of the AHA; more recently his articles have appeared in the History of Education Quarterly, the Journal of American History, and Review: Arts and Literature of the Americas.
Azuma is currently involved in three new projects. First, he is conducting research on the meaning of race and citizenship in the postwar experiences of Japanese Americans, including their roles as "cultural broker" in occupied Japan and in the resumption of immigration from Japan, as well as the construction of a transnationalized ethnic identity and community among them despite the nationalizing effects of the mass internment. Azuma's second project deals with the formation of a "transborder" Japanese community in U.S.-Mexican Californias between 1900 and 1942, while the third is to compile a collection of essays that look into the intersections of U.S. ethnic studies and Asian area studies through the lenses of Japanese migration and imperial expansion. These projects all attempt to question orthodox nation-based analyses of history and compartmentalized ways of learning.
Currently, Professor Azuma serves as a member of the Faculty Steering Committees for the Asian American Studies Program and the Center for East Asian Studies.
Courses Taught (As Schedule Allows)
For current course listings, consult the Course Directory.
- HIST 155 Introduction to Asian American History
- HIST 354 American Expansion into the Pacific
- HIST 374 Japanese American History
