Department of History and Government
Allan W. Austin
Professor of History
Department of History and Government
306 Mercy Hall
Misericordia University
Dallas, PA 18612
(570) 674-6793
Email:
EDUCATION
Ph.D., University of Cincinnati, 2001
*Major Field: United States History
*Minor Fields: Film and History, Modern Japanese History
M.A., Bowling Green State University, 1993
B.A., Bowling Green State University, 1991 (Magna Cum Laude)
EXPERIENCE
Professor of History, Misericordia University, 2011-present
Associate Professor of History, Misericordia University, 2007-2011
Assistant Professor of History, College Misericordia, 2001-2007
History Instructor, University of Cincinnati, 1997, 1998, 2000
Teaching Assistantship, University of Cincinnati, 1996-1999, 2000-2001
History Instructor, El Paso Community College, 1994-1996
Teaching Assistantship, Bowling Green State University, 1991-1993
PUBLICATIONS
Books
Quaker Brotherhood: Interracial Activism and the American Friends Service Committee, 1917-1950, Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2012.
From Concentration Camp to Campus: Japanese American Students and World War II, Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
Edited Books
Asian American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia, Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2010 (co-edited with Huping Ling).
Space and Time: Essays on Visions of History in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2010 (co-edited with David C. Wright Jr.).
Articles
“‘Intelligent Leadership in the Cause of Racial Brotherhood’: Quakers, Social Science, and the American Friends Service Committee’s Interwar Racial Activism,” in Thomas J. Davis, editor, Religion and Philanthropic Organizations: Family, Friend, or Foe?, Indiana University Press, 2013: 122-143.
“Superman Goes to War: Teaching Japanese American Exile and Incarceration with Film,” Journal of American Ethnic History 30:4 (2011): 51-56.
“The Limits of Star Trek’s Final Frontier: ‘The Omega Glory’ and 1960s American Liberalism,” in David C. Wright Jr. and Allan W. Austin, editors, Space and Time: Essays on Visions of History in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2010.
“‘Let’s do away with walls!’: The American Friends Service Committee’s Interracial Section and the 1920s United States,” Quaker History 98:1 (2009): 1-34.
“Eastward Pioneers: Japanese American Resettlement during World War II and the Contested Meaning of Exile and Incarceration,” Journal of American Ethnic History 26:2 (2007): 58-84.
“Projecting Japanese American Exile and Incarceration: Ethnicity, the Enemy, and Mass Incarceration in Film during World War II,” 2004-2005 Film and History CD-ROM Annual, Cleveland, Oklahoma: Film and History Center, 2006.
“The Internment of Japanese Americans Was Racist,” in Don Nardo, editor, World War II, Farmington Hill, Michigan: Greenhaven Press, 2005.
“Explaining Exile and Incarceration: Documentary Film and Japanese Americans during World War II,” in Peter C. Rollins, John E. O’Connor, and James Knecht, editors, Proceedings of the Film and History League Conference entitled “War in Film, Television, and History,” Cleveland, Oklahoma: Film and History Center, 2005.
“‘A Finer Set of Hopes and Dreams’: The Japanese American Citizens League and Ethnic Community in Cincinnati, Ohio, 1942-1950,” in Sucheng Chan, editor, Remapping Asian American History, Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press, 2003: 87-105.
“Loyalty and Concentration Camps in America: The Japanese American Precedent and the Internal Security Act of 1950,” in Erica Harth, editor, Last Witnesses: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001: 253-270.
“Japanese Americans and the Internal Security Act of 1950: American Concentration Camps and the Cold War,” Proceedings of the Ohio Academy of History 2000, Ohio Academy of History, 2001: 9-18.
Reviews
J. Richard Stevens, Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence: The Evolution of a National Icon (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2015), Choice, October 2015
Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), Choice, April 2015.
Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), Choice, September 2014.
Joint review of Robin S. Rosenberg, editor, Our Superheroes, Ourselves (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) and Robin S. Rosenberg and Peter Coogan, What Is a Superhero? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), Choice (February 2014).
Joint review of Cherstin M. Lyon, Prisons and Patriots: Japanese American Wartime Citizenship, Civil Disobedience, and Historical Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012) and Greg Robinson, After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), American Historical Review (April 2013): 535-537.
Brian Komei Dempster, editor, Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2011), The Journal of American Ethnic History (Winter 2013): 131-132.
Eric Walz, Nikkei in the Interior West: Japanese Immigration and Community Building, 1882-1945 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), Choice (November 2012).
Frederick P. Close, Tokyo Rose/An American Patriot: A Dual Biography (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2010), Choice (December 2010).
Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Japanese American Resettlement Through the Lens: Hikaru Iwasaki and the WRA’s Photographic Section, 1943-1945 (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2009), Choice (March 2010).
Donna McDaniel and Vanessa Julye, Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African Americans, and the Myth of Racial Justice (Philadelphia: Quaker Press, 2009), Quaker History (Spring 2010).
Eric L. Muller, American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty During World War II (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), The Journal of American Ethnic History, (Winter 2009): 119-120.
Alice Yang Murray, Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), Choice (November2008).
Josephine Fowler, Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists: Organizing in American and International Communist Movements, 1919-1933 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2007), Journal of American History (June 2008): 227-228.
Daniel J. Leab, Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm (University Park, Pennsylvania:The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), Choice (January 2008).
Karen L. Ishizuka, Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society (Winter 2007): 156-158.
Sucheng Chan, editor, The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation: Stories of War, Revolution, Flight, and New Beginnings (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006, Choice (June 2007).
Noriko Asato, Teaching Mikadoism: The Attack on Japanese Language Schools in Hawaii, California, and Washington, 1919-1927 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), The American Historical Review (February 2007): 211-212.
Yuji Ichioka, Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History, ed. by Gordon H. Chang and Eiichiro Azuma (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), Choice (February 2007).
Bruce Elleman, Japanese-American Civilian Prisoner Exchanges and Detention Camps, 1941-1945 (London: Routledge, 2006), The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society (Spring 2006): 359-361.
Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Choice (January 2006).
Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project (http://www.densho.org), A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the U.S. Constitution (http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/perfectunion/experience/index.html), and Life Interrupted: The Japanese American Experience in WWII Arkansas (http://www.lifeinterrupted.org), Journal of American History (June 2005): 326-328 (also available at History Matters at http://historymatters.gmu.edu).
Kent A. Ono, editor, A Companion to Asian American Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005) and Kent A. Ono, editor, Asian American Studies After Critical Mass (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005), Choice (October 2005).
Liping Zhu and Rose Estep Fosha, Ethnic Oasis: The Chinese in the Black Hills (Pierre, South Dakota: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2004), Journal of the West (Fall 2005): 87-88.
Võ, Linda Trinh, Mobilizing an Asian American Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), Choice (May 2005).
Josephine Lee, Imogene L. Lim, and Yuko Matsukawa, editors, Re/collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), Journal of the West (Fall 2004): 80.
Gary Okihiro, Common Ground: Reimagining American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Journal of the West (Fall 2003): 93.
Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society (Summer 2003): 362-364.
Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), Journal of the West (Winter 2003): 111.
Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001), Ohio History (Summer-Autumn 2002): 224-225.
Encyclopedia Articles
“Superman,” in Edward J. Blum, editor, Dictionary of American History, Supplement: America in the World, 1776 to the Present, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, in press.
“National Japanese American Student Relocation Council,” “American Friends Service Committee,” “OWI/WRA documentaries,” “John Nason,” and “Thomas Bodine” in The Densho Encyclopedia of the Japanese American Incarceration, 2012.
“Japanese-American Relocation,” in Robert Zieger, editor, Encyclopedia of U.S. Political History (volume 5, 1923-1945), Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2010.
“The Asian American Experience: History, Culture, and Scholarship” (with Huping Ling), “Asian American Historiography and Historians,” “Anti-Japanese Movement,” and “Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922),” in Huping Ling and Allan W. Austin, editors, Asian American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia, Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2010.
“Japanese Americans, World War II” and “Tokyo Rose,” in John P. Resch, editor in chief, Americans at War: Society, Culture, and the Homefront, New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 2004.
“Japanese Americans,” in Dennis Cove, editor, Peoples of North America, Danbury, CT: Grolier, 2003.
Entries on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Fred Korematsu, and the McCarran Internal Security Act in Allan Winkler, editor, Volume 9, Encyclopedia of American History, Facts on File, 2003.
“Sago,” in Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneé Ornelas, editors, The Cambridge World History of Food, Cambridge University Press, 2000, with H. Michael Tarver: 201-206.
PRESENTATIONS
“‘Who can halt the dread menace of . . . the Man with No Face!’: Comic Books, the ‘Yellow Peril,’ and American Culture in the early Cold War,” Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2015
“Addressing Barriers to Reducing Racism through Narrative and Popular Culture: Teaching Comic Books and Social Justice,” Diversity Challenge: Race, Culture, and Social Justice, Boston College, Boston, Massachusetts, 2015 (with Patrick Hamilton)
“Giving ‘Brotherhood . . . New Meaning’” : The Great War and New Intersections of Quaker Activism on Race and Peace, World War I: Dissent, Activism, and Transformation, Georgian Court University, Lakewood, New Jersey, 2014
“Exploring a ‘Cave of Horrors’: Batman and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II,” Popular Culture Association—Canada Conference, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, 2013
“Defective Comics: Batman, Race, and the Making of American Identity during WWII,” Eastern American Studies Association Conference, Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, VA, 2013
“‘Academic Barnstorming’: The AFSC’s Visiting Lectureship Program and New Approaches to Postwar Interracial Activism,” Conference of Quaker Historians and Archivists, Pickering College, Ontario, Canada, 2012
“Popular Culture and Public Policy: A Case Study of Japanese Americans and World War II,” Global Landscapes Conference, King’s College, 2012
“‘Intelligent Leadership in the Cause of Racial Brotherhood’: Quakers, Social Science, and the American Friends Service Committee’s Racial Activism, 1917-1941,” Family, Friend, Foe?: The Relationship of Religion and Philanthropy in Religious Philanthropic Organizations, IUPUI, 2010
“‘Hammering on Cold Iron’: A History of the American Interracial Peace Committee, 1927-1931,” Conference of Quaker Historians and Archivists, Wilmington College, 2010
“Staging ‘Tours of Understanding’: The American Friends Service Committee, Quakers, and Race Relations in the Early Twentieth Century,” Organization of American Historians Annual Conference, Seattle, 2009
“The Limits of Star Trek’s Final Frontier: ‘The Omega Glory,’ Race, and American Liberalism in 1968,” The Legacy of 1968: An Interdisciplinary Conference, Chestnut Hill College, Philadelphia, 2008
Comments on conference panel titled “Utopia and Anxiety: Ethnic and Religious Identities in America’s Gilded Age,” American Historical Association Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, 2007
“Collecting Stories of the Back Mountain: Using Oral Histories as Teaching Tools,” Conference on the Small City and Regional Community, King’s College, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, 2006
“The ‘Friendly principle of brotherhood’: The American Friends Service Committee’s Interracial Section and the Quaker Approach to Race Relations in the United States, 1924-1929,” ConferenceofQuakerHistoriansandArchivists, Guilford College, Greensboro, North Carolina, 2006
“Projecting Japanese Relocation: Ethnicity, the Enemy, and Mass Incarceration in Film during World War II,” International Association for Media and History Conference: Projections of Race and Ethnicity: National Identities and Global Networks, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2005
“Explaining Exile and Incarceration: Documentary Film and Japanese Americans during World War II,” Film and History Conference: “War in Film, Television, and History,” Dallas, Texas, 2004
“The Beale Affair: Internal Tension and External Success in Japanese American Student Resettlement during the Second World War,” Conference of Quaker Historians and Archivists, George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon, 2004
“‘Ambassadors of Good Will’: Contested Meanings of Japanese American Student Resettlement During World War II,” Organization of American Historians Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, 2004
“Living in Hope and Working on Faith: Obstacles Faced by the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council During the Second World War,” History of Education Society Annual Conference, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 2001
“American Concentration Camps and the Cold War: Japanese Americans and the Internal Security Act of 1950,” Ohio Academy of History, Otterbein College, Westerville, Ohio, 2000
“‘Strength in Unity’: The Japanese American Citizens League in Cincinnati, Ohio, 1945-1947,” Bluegrass Symposium, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 1998
INVITED TALKS
“DC vs. Marvel,” Back Mountain Library, 2015
“It’s A Small World After All”: Superheroes, Race, and the Rise of Multiculturalism in the United States, Penn State University-Harrisburg, 2015
“It’s A Small World After All”: Superheroes, Race, and the Rise of Multiculturalism in the United States, Penn State University-York, 2015
“Not All that Different: The Rise of the Ethnic Superhero in the 1960s and 1970s,” History Day, Misericordia University, 2015
“A Nation of Immigrants?: Northeastern Pennsylvania and the History of American Nativism,” Alumni Weekend class, 2014