Naoko Shibusawa is a historian U.S. political culture. She studies U.S.empire and political culture, as well as transnational Asian American history. She is interested in how commonplace ideas or ideologies in American culture have supported U.S. domestic and foreign policy and how nonstate actors have reproduced and reinforced state goals.

Her first book, America's Geisha Ally: Re-Imagining the Japanese Enemy (Harvard 2006, pbk 2010, Chinese trans, 2012, 2nd Chinese trans, 2017), examines how Americans were able to accept the Japanese as valuable Cold War allies so quickly after a brutal and racialized war. Her current book project explores the orientalism in Cold War homophobia and seeks to understand why sexual practices became important for surveillance during the advent of the national security state. She has also written on Cold War ideology and Euromodernity.

Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship/Andrew W. Mellon Career Enhancement Fellowship, 2007-2008
American Council of Learned Societies/Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, 2004-2005
University of Hawai'i Research Relations Fund Award, 2002-2003
University of Hawai'i Arts & Sciences Faculty Award, 2002-2003
Japan-America Society, Chicago Chapter, Fellowship, 1996-1997
Center for International and Comparative Studies Graduate Grant, 1995
Northwestern University Fellowship, 1989-1990

Work in progress:

Liberal Blinders of US Capitalist Imperialism, under contract with UNC Press

Queer Betrayals: The Treason Trial of John David Provoo

 

The Society  for American Foreign Relations Peter L. Hahn Distinguished Service Award, 2024

Brown University President’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Governance, 2020

Brown University William G. McLoughlin Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Social Sciences, 2017

Brown University Karen T. Romer Award for Undergraduate Mentoring, 2012 

Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), American Historical Association (AHA), American Studies Association (ASA), Organization of American Historians (OAH), Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA), Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS)

I teach courses in 20th century U.S. history, Cold War cultural history, and empires & cultures, as well as courses on the history of U.S. foreign relations/American empire from contact to the present. Current teaching interests include decolonization; social movements; global history; empire, slavery, & capitalism; U.S. settler colonialism; and political economic discourse. I mentor students from freshmen through the graduate levels.