Hello and thanks for visiting!
My name is Laura Ishiguro (she/her).
I am a settler belonging to Japanese (Nikkei) and hakujin (white, primarily British) families. I grew up on unceded W̱SÁNEĆ and lək̓ʷəŋən territories on southern Vancouver Island, and now live on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ territories, where I work at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver).
At UBC, I am the Director of Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies and an Associate Professor in the Department of History.
I am also a Faculty Associate at the UBC Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice, and a Wilson Associate of the Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University.
I completed my BA Honours in History at the University of Victoria (2006), then my MA in History at Simon Fraser University (2008) and my PhD in History at University College London (2011).
My research specializations include British Columbia, Canada, and British imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; settler colonialism; Nikkei history; gender, family, society, and the everyday. I am most inspired by methodological play at the edges of disciplinary convention, and historical work that seeks to cultivate better futures. I teach courses on histories of Canada and global empires/comparative colonialism, and supervise Honours and graduate students in related fields. My professional and community service is propelled by a commitment to equity and the justice work that historical thinking might do in the world.
Beyond this, I am interested in the politics of humour and graffiti, unofficial or unsanctioned historical memorials, rain, vegetables, the long run, the skateboard, and genre fiction. These are not technically my work, but they certainly aren’t unrelated.
Header image: from Gamadiis (Laura Ishiguro, 2019).