Masumi Izumi

Masumi Izumi is a Professor of North American Studies in the Faculty of Global and Regional Studies and the Director of the International Institute of American Studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. She received her B.A. in Anglo-American Studies from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, M.A. in Political Studies from Queen's University at Kingston in Canada, and Ph.D. in American Studies from Doshisha University.

Her book, The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law: Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s (Temple UP, 2019) was named in the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles 2020. She also published Nikkei Kanada-jin no Ido to Undo: Shirarezaru Nihon-jin no Ekkyo Seikatsu Shi [The Japanese Canadian Movement: The Little-Known Trans-Pacific History of Japanese Migration and Activism] (Takanashi-shobo, 2020, in Japanese), a comprehensive history of Japanese Canadians. This book received the Pierre Savard Award for a “Book Written in a Language Other than French or English” by the International Council for Canadian Studies.

She has published numerous articles on the uprooting and incarceration of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians, postwar revival of Japanese North American cultures, and Asian North American activism, including “Reconsidering Ethnic Culture and Community: A Case Study on Japanese Canadian Taiko Drumming;” Journal of Asian American Studies 4.1 (2001): 35-56; and “Seeking the Truth, Spiritual and Political: Japanese American Community Building through Engaged Ethnic Buddhism”; Peace and Change 35.1 (2010): 39-67. Masumi has also contributed chapters in various anthologies, including “To Make Where You Are Your Home: Hatsuye Egami’s Migration and Writings in Japanese American Concentration Camps”; in Jean Amato and Kyunghee Pyun, eds., Multidisciplinary Representations of Home and Homeland in Diaspora (Routledge, 2024), 131-145, and “The Vancouver Asahi Connection: (Re-)engagement of the Families of Returnees/Deportees in Japanese Canadian History,” in Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Guy Beauregard, Hsiu-chuan Lee, eds., The Subject(s) of Human Rights: Crises, Violations,and Asian American Critique (Temple UP, 2019), 56-73. She also co-edited and translated a bilingual anthology, Trans-Pacific Reflections on the Grand Forks Japanese Canadian Commemorative Photo Book (1946) (Mitari-sha, 2026).