Masumi Izumi

Masumi Izumi is a Professor of North American Studies at the Department of Global and Regional Studies, Doshisha University, in Kyoto, Japan. She is a historian of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians, and she has written extensively about their wartime removal and incarceration as well as about their post-internment community building efforts. She is a co-chair of the Archives Cluster in the Past Wrongs, Future Choices project. Masumi examines the racial persecutions of diasporic Japanese population in Canada and the US, and highlights the reactions and activism in the Japanese North American communities against such injustice. By focusing on the experiences of the Issei (first generation), Kibei-Nisei (second generation Japanese Americans who grew up in Japan), and Japanese Canadian deportees during and after World War II, Masumi attempts to reinterpret notions such as “citizenship” and “nationalism” from a transnational perspective. Her works include The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law: Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s (Temple University Press, 2019). Outstanding Academic Title, Choice, 2020. New in paperback.