Eiichiro Azuma is Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies. He is specialized in Asian American history with an emphasis on Japanese Americans and transpacific migration, as well as Japanese colonialism and U.S.-Japan relations. Azuma's interest in migration and transnationalism has stemmed partially from his personal experience as an immigrant from Japan. He holds a M.A. in Asian American Studies (1992) and a Ph.D. in history (2000), both from University of California at Los Angeles. He has taught at Penn since January 2001.

Azuma is author of Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford University Press, 2005), which won the Theodore Saloutos Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Honorable Mention in the Frederick Jackson Turner Award by the Organization of American Historians and a History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies, as well as a Hiroshi Shimizu book prize from the Japanese Association of American Studies. With Professor Gordon H. Chang of Stanford, Azuma also co-edited Yuji Ichioka, Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History (Stanford University Press, 2006)--recipient of the Honorable Mention in the History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Azuma has published over a dozen peer-reviewed academic articles; recently his articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, Journal of Asian Studies and Pacific Historical Review. In 2008-2009, he is a recipient of the Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellowship from the University of Texas, Austin.

Azuma is currently involved in three projects. A sequel to his 2005 monograph, the first project looks into the experience of Japanese Americans in Occupied Japan and how it affected their return to mainstream America in the wake of the wartime internment. With a focus on their role as “cultural broker” that mediated between white American occupiers and defeated Japanese, the study will unravel what race, culture and citizenship meant to an American minority in the global context of postwar U.S. ascendancy. 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 probe intersections of U.S. ethnic studies and Asian area studies through the lens of Japanese migration and imperial expansion. These projects attempt to question an orthodox nation-based analysis of history and a spatially compartmentalized way of learning.

At Penn, Professor Azuma is currently on the Faculty Steering Committees for the Asian American Studies Program and the Center for East Asian Studies. He also serves as a member of the Executive Board of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, and of the Editorial Board for the Journal of American Ethnic History.