Education
Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, 2004
Michael Masatsugu, Ph.D.
Professor, Director of American Studies, Director of Global Humanities (M.A.)
Contact Info
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
- Reorienting the Pure Land: Nisei Buddhism in the Transwar Years, 1943-1965 (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2023).
- “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.
- “‘Beyond this world of transiency and impermanence’: Japanese Americans, Dharma Bums and the Making of American Buddhism in the Early Cold War Years.” Pacific Historical Review 77:3 (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 https://www.janm.org/exhibits/sutra-and-bible
- College of Liberal Arts Faculty Research Grant, Towson University ($2500), 2019
- Nominee, Towson University LGBTQ+ Inclusion in Academics Award, 2018-19
Teaching
HIST 146: History of the United States since the Civil War
HIST 300: US Cold War Diplomacy-Asia