Eiichiro Azuma

Eiichiro Azuma is is the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University Pennsylvania. He specializes in Asian American history and transpacific history, with an emphasis on Japanese American experience, migration, diaspora and settler colonialism, as well as U.S. and Japanese imperialism and U.S.-Japan relations. He holds an 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. Between 2009 and 2019, Azuma held the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Chair in History. In 2008–2009, he was a recipient of the Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellowship from the University of Texas, Austin, and since 2020, he has served as a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Azuma also taught at National Chengchi University in Taiwan as a visiting professor in Spring 2021. 

Azuma is author of two monographs and two co-edited books. In 2019, he published In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire (University of California Press), which received the John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association. Azuma also authored 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 (OAH), and the History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies, as well as the Hiroshi Shimizu Book Prize from the Japanese Association of American Studies. In 2006, with Professor Gordon H. Chang of Stanford, Azuma co-edited Yuji Ichioka, Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History (Stanford University Press)—recipient of the Honorable Mention in the History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. All these books were translated and published in Japanese. Azuma also co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Asian American History (Oxford University Press, 2016/2020) with UCLA Professor and Associate Provost David K. Yoo.

Azuma has published over a dozen peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in academic anthologies. Recently his articles appeared in the Journal of American History, Journal of Asian Studies, Pacific Historical Review, Journal of American-East Asian Relations, and Journal of American Ethnic History. Starting in 2009, he is co-editor of the Asian American Experiences book series at the University of Illinois Press. He has served as a member of the Executive Board of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society (2007–2010), and of the Editorial Board for the Pacific Historical Review (2011–2013), Journal of Asian American Studies (2012–2016), and Journal of American Ethnic History (2009–present). Azuma is a member of the OAH’s Distinguished Lectureship Program. 

At Penn, Professor Azuma is on the Faculty Steering Committees for the Asian American Studies Program and the Center for East Asian Studies. He has served as the director of the Asian American Studies Program in 2012-2016 and 2021-2022. In 2007 and 2008, Azuma received the Rosane Rocher Faculty and Staff Award from the Pan Asian American Community House and the Gloria Twine Chisum Award for Distinguished Faculty from the James Brister Society, respectively.