Research & writing

I am an historian of northern North America (Canada) and the British Empire, with a particular focus on British Columbia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I am now 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.

I am also working on several other projects, including 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.


Book cover of Laura Ishiguro's Nothing to Write Home About: British Family Correspondence and the Settler Colonial Everyday in British Columbia from UBC Press, 2019. Coloured archival image of a woman sitting on a rock overlooking the ocean, writing or drawing.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

Journal articles and book chapters

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).

Public engagement, blurbs, reports, and other writing

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