Michael Masatsugu, Ph.D.

Professor, Director of American Studies, Director of Global Humanities (M.A.)

Name

Contact Info

Phone:
Office:
LA-4221
Email:
Hours:
Monday & Wednesday 12:30pm
-1:30pm & by appointment

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, 2004

Areas of Expertise

Modern Buddhism, Cold War Diplomacy, Asian American History

Biography

Dr. Masatsugu is director of the program in American Studies and the graduate program in Global Humanities.  His current research examines the role that religion, race, and political diplomacy played in shaping understandings of Buddhism among U.S. government officials and the American public during the early decades of the Cold War.  His first book examined Japanese American Buddhist struggles for inclusion and community from World War II to the early Cold War years. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and has taught at the University of Maine, Orono, Colby College, and Loyola Marymount University.  From 2015-16 he was a visiting scholar at the Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture at the University of Southern California

  

Works in Preparation

  • Cold War Diplomacy and the Buddhist World, 1945-1969

Publications

  •   
  • “Memorial to the Embraced and Discarded:  The Manzanar I-Rei-To and Nikkei Buddhist-Christian responses to U.S. Nationalism during the Second World War, Buddhist-Christian Studies 42 (2022), 173-82.  
  • With Michihiro Ama, “Japanese American Buddhism,” Jon Butler ed., Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (New York:  Oxford University Press, August, 2021).  
  • “Haiku on the Road:  Albert Saijo’s contested historical legacy.”  Amerasia Journal 39:3 (Winter, 2013), 58-82.  
  • “‘Bonded by Reverence toward the Buddha’:  Asian Decolonization, Japanese Americans and the Making of the Buddhist World, 1947-1965.” Journal of Global History 8:1 (March, 2013), 142-64.  
  • (August, 2008), 423-51.  Winner of the Western History Association’s Arrington-Prucha Prize. 

 

Recent Grants, Community Service, and Acknowledgments:

  • Office of Sponsored Programs and Research (OSPR), Towson University, Faculty Development and Research Committee Grant ($6000), 2023  
  • Scholars Advisory Council, “Sutra and Bible” Exhibition, Japanese American National Museum,  Los Angeles, California, 2020-22   
  • College of Liberal Arts Faculty Research Grant, Towson University ($2500), 2019  
  • Nominee, Towson University LGBTQ+ Inclusion in 鶹ý Award, 2018-19 

Teaching

HIST 146: History of the United States since the Civil War

HIST 300: US Cold War Diplomacy-Asia