The Canadian Studies Program is delighted to announce that Dr. Hidetaka Hirota, an associate professor in the Department of History, has been appointed as the program's new co-director beginning July 1. Professor Hirota is a social and legal historian of North America, with a focus on immigration, especially nativism and immigration control in the 19th century.
Professor Hirota was born in Japan, and received his BA in foreign studies from Sophia University in Tokyo. He received his MA and PhD in history from Boston College, where his dissertation won the university's best humanities dissertation award. He has been affiliated with the Canadian Studies Program since his arrival at Berkeley in 2022. Before joining the Berkeley faculty, Professor Hirota taught at the City College of New York and Sophia University. He also previously served as a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia University.
Professor Hirota's award-winning first book, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy, identifies a new origin of immigration restriction in the United States, based on a study of the deportation of impoverished Irish immigrants from the United States to Canada and Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. His current book project, titled The American Dilemma, explores how the US government restricted the immigration of foreign contract workers from Canada, Asia, Mexico, and Europe at the turn of the 20th century. He is also currently working on a project exploring the history of Japanese immigration to Canada and the US, and its political impacts in those countries.
Current interim co-director Richard A. Rhodes will continue to serve alongside Professor Hirota for the next year to ensure a smooth leadership transition. Please join us in welcoming Professor Hirota into his new role!