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Aoki/History - POC Seminar Series Professor Hidetaka Hirota
Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at Sophia University, where he teaches North American Studies and Migration Studies. An historian of the United States with particular interests in immigration, race and ethnicity, law and policy, labor, and transnational/international history. He will start his new position as an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, during the Spring 2022 semester.
He is the author of Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2017). It received the First Book Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Lois P. Rudnick Award from the New England American Studies Association, and the Donald Murphy Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies, as well as Special Commendation for the Peter J. Gomez Prize from the Massachusetts Historical Society and Honorable Mention for the Peggy O'Brien Book Prize from the Irish Association for American Studies. The publication of the book was supported by the American Society for Legal History Paul L. Murphy Award.
His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in top journals in the fields of United States History, American Studies, and Migration Studies, such as the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. These articles won best essay awards and distinctions from multiple scholarly associations, including the Organization of American Historians Louis Pelzer Memorial Award, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society Carlton C. Qualey Award, and the Society for History in the Federal Government James Madison Prize.
He is currently working on two book projects. One is titled "The American Dilemma: Foreign Contract Labor and the Making of U.S. Immigration Policy." The book examines a fundamental dilemma in American history – the tension between nativism against foreigners and demand for their labor. By locating the origins of this dilemma in the federal government’s attempts and failure to restrict the immigration of contract workers from Asia, Mexico, Canada, Europe, and Puerto Rico in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the book reveals how the debate over imported labor gave rise to a national immigration regime in the United States. The other project, “Democratic Intolerance: The History of American Nativism,” provides a synthetic history of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States from the American Revolution to the present.
For more information, please contact Nina Marie Bell at [email protected]