Research Guides: Japanese-American Diaspora Seminars: Speakers & Moderator Profiles

koikari bio
Mire Koikari is a professor of women’s studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Born and raised in Japan, she completed her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Interested in issues of gender, race, nation, and empire, she has explored the ways in which feminist discourses and practices have been informed by and in turn informed racism, nationalism, and imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her publications include Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan (Temple University Press, 2008), Cold War Encounters in US-occupied Okinawa: Women, Militarized Domesticity, and Transnationalism in East Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2015), “‘The World is Our Campus’: Michigan State University and Cold War Home Economics in US-occupied Okinawa, 1945 - 1972” (Gender and History, Vol. 24, No. 1, April 2012), “Remasculinizing the Nation: Gender, Disaster, and the Politics of National Resilience in Post-3.11 Japan” (Japan Forum, October 2017), and “‘Love! Spam’: Food, Military, and Empire in Post-WWII Okinawa” (in Devouring Japan: Global Perspectives on Japanese Culinary Identity, edited by Nancy Stalker, Oxford University Press). She has been a recipient of fellowships and grants from the following organizations: the Japan Foundation (research fellowship, January to June 2013), the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Japan scholar, September to December 2011), the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (conference grant, fall 2012), Stanford University (Asian Library Collection travel grant, summer 2015), and the Global Center of Excellence at Kyoto University (visiting professor, June 2012), among others.

azuma bio
Eiichiro Azuma is Alan Charles Kors Term Chair Associate Professor of History and Interim Director of Asian American Studies at University of Pennsylvania. He is author of Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford, 2005), and co-editor, with Gordon H. Chang, of Yuji Ichioka, Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History (Stanford, 2006). In 2016, Azuma co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Asian American History with David K. Yoo. He has served on the editorial boards of the Pacific Historical Review, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Journal of American Ethnic History. Since 2009, he has been a co-editor of the Asian American Experience series published by the University of Illinois Press. Azuma has also published a number of book chapters and peered-reviewed articles, including those in the Journal of American History, Pacific Historical Review, and Journal of Asian Studies.

totani bio
Yuma Totani is a professor of modern Japanese history at the University of Hawaii and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. She undertakes a series of multi-year research and book publications that seek to illuminate the causes, conditions and consequences of World War II in Asia and the Pacific, and consider their implications to our understanding the principles of international justice, accountability, and the rule of law. She is the author of The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (2008), Justice in Asia and the Pacific, 1945-1952: Allied War Crimes Prosecutions (2015), and The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal: Law, History, and Jurisprudence (co-authored with David Cohen, forthcoming).