Azuma and Hart Named Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professors of American History
Eiichiro Azuma and Emma Hart have been named Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professors of American History in the School of Arts & Sciences.
Eiichiro Azuma specializes in Asian American 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 is the author of In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire, which received the John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association. His first book, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America, also received multiple awards, including the Theodore Saloutos Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and the History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. He has coedited two books, the award-winning Yuji Ichioka, Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History, with Gordon H. Chang of Stanford; and the Oxford Handbook of Asian American History with David K. Yoo of UCLA.
Azuma has published over a dozen peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in academic anthologies. He has been co-editor of the Asian American Experiences book series at the University of Illinois Press since 2009 and is on the editorial board of the Journal of American Ethnic History. At Penn, he is on the Faculty Steering Committees for the Asian American Studies Program and the Center for East Asian Studies, and he has twice served as director of the Asian American Studies Program.
Emma Hart teaches and researches the history of early North America, the Atlantic World, and early modern Britain between 1500 and 1800. Her major research interests lie in urban history, social, and economic history, as well as in the intersections of history, material culture, urban studies, geography and sociology. She has written two books, Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World and Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism. She has published scholarly articles in journals including The William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Studies, and Urban History, where she co-edited a special issue on early modern cities and globalization with Mariana Dantas. She also contributed essays to The Cambridge History of America and the World and The Cambridge History of the American Revolution (forthcoming).
Hart is currently developing two new research projects: a biography of the eighteenth-century Scottish novelist, historian, and essayist Tobias Smollett; and a long history of America’s urban-rural divide. She is a founding board member of the Global Urban History Project, a transnational online collective of scholars. In 2015 she was elected as a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. At Penn she is the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and a co-editor of the Penn Press series, “Early American Studies.”
The Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chairs of American History were established by the late Roy and Jeannette Nichols, longtime members of the history faculty. Roy Nichols served as Dean of Graduate Studies in Penn Arts & Sciences and as Vice Provost of the University, while Jeannette Nichols served as chair of the graduate group in economic history.
