I am an historian of northern North America (Canada) and the British Empire, with a particular interest in British Columbia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I am primarily focused on reimagining how we might tell and teach histories of people of Asian descent in northern North America, with an emphasis on Nikkei or Japanese Canadian histories.
My other projects include a mixed-genre exploration of trauma, the archive, and feminist history-writing, underpinned by an interest in methodological experimentation and imagination at the edges of disciplinary convention.
My earlier research sought to understand the making of a settler colonial society in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British Columbia by investigating the local and trans-imperial stories, ideas, relationships, and experiences of white British families. Both deeply rooted in place and transnational in its framing, this work was situated at the intersections of a number of fields including British Columbian and Canadian colonial historiography, the new imperial history, and settler colonial studies. Underpinning my research and its interventions in these fields was my contention that everyday lives, family relationships, and societal formation are critical parts of settler colonial projects – political, intimate, foundational histories with enduring legacies that continue to structure British Columbia, Canada, and other settler colonial sites around the world today.
Based on this work, my book, Nothing to Write Home About: British Family Correspondence and the Settler Colonial Everyday in British Columbia, was published by UBC Press in 2019. A detailed study of thousands of British family letters written between the United Kingdom and British Columbia between 1858 and 1914, this work elucidates the critical, entwined, and otherwise unexamined role of trans-imperial families and the everyday in the making of a white settler society.
Selected publications
Books
- Laura Ishiguro, Nothing to Write Home About: British Family Correspondence and the Settler Colonial Everyday in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019).
Journal articles and book chapters
- Laura Ishiguro, “‘A Dreadful Little Glutton Always Telling You About Food’: The Epistolary Everyday and the Making of Settler Colonial British Columbia,” Canadian Historical Review 99, 2 (June 2018): 258-283.
- Laura Ishiguro, “Northwestern North America (Canadian West) to 1900,” Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism, eds. Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini (New York: Routledge, 2017), 125-138.
- Laura Ishiguro, “Growing up and grown up … in our future city: discourses of childhood and settler futurity in colonial British Columbia,” BC Studies 190 (Summer 2016): 15-37.
- This article won the 2017 Canadian Committee on Migration, Ethnicity, and Transnationalism article prize from the Canadian Historical Association.
- Laura Ishiguro, “How I wish I might be near: distance and the epistolary family in late nineteenth-century condolence letters,” in Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History, eds. Adele Perry, Karen Dubinsky, and Henry Yu (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 212-227.
- Laura Ishiguro, “Material girls: daughters, dress, and distance in the trans-imperial family,” in Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950, eds. Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 214-227.
Guest-edited special issues
- Laura Madokoro, Steven High, and Laura Ishiguro, eds., “Loss and the city,” special issue of Urban History Review 48, 2 (Spring 2021). (Primary editors Madokoro and High.)
- Laura Ishiguro, ed., “Histories of settler colonialism,” special issue of BC Studies 190 (Summer 2016).
- Introduction – Laura Ishiguro, “Histories of Settler Colonialism: Considering New Currents,” BC Studies 190 (Summer 2016): 5-13.
- Esmé Cleall, Laura Ishiguro, and Emily J. Manktelow, eds., “Imperial relations: histories of family in the British Empire,” special issue of Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 14, 1 (April 2013).
- Introduction – Esmé Cleall, Laura Ishiguro, and Emily J. Manktelow, “Imperial Relations: Histories of Family in the British Empire,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 14, 1 (April 2013): doi:10.1353/cch.2013.0006.
Other writing
- Laura Ishiguro, “50 Years, 50 Books: Terrain of Memory,” UBC Press, June 2022.
- Laura Ishiguro and Laura Madokoro, “White Supremacy, Political Violence, and Community: The Questions We Ask, from 1907 to 2017,” Active History, September 2017.
- Republished in Daniel Ross, ed., Confronting Canadian Migration History (Active History, 2019), pp. 77-83, ISBN 978-1-9990201-2-5 (print).
- Laura Ishiguro, Nicole Yakashiro, and Will Archibald, “Settler Colonialism and Japanese Canadian History,” report for Landscapes of Injustice, September 2017.