Masako Hattori

Masako Hattori is a historian of the twentieth-century United States. Her academic interests include war and society, social policy, imperialism and nationalism, U.S. foreign relations, transnational history, as well as education, youth, and childhood. She is particularly interested in exploring how war and military matters shape lives and societies. She received her Ph.D. in history from Columbia University (New York, U.S.A.), where her dissertation, “Across War and Peace: Youth, Higher Education, and National Security in the United States, 1917–1945,” was nominated for the Bancroft Dissertation Award from the university. An essay stemming from the dissertation was a finalist for the 2017 Louis Pelzer Memorial Award from the Organization of American Historians. Before coming to NUS, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University and an assistant professor of history at Shujitsu University in Japan.

Her first monograph, The Age of Youth: American Society and the Two World Wars (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), challenges a widely accepted idea in U.S. historiography—that American society was affected by military affairs only briefly and during times of war—by combining the histories of U.S. foreign relations, U.S. social policy, and youth and education. It demonstrates how fluctuations in national security concerns in the first half of the twentieth century shaped adults’ perceptions of young people, particularly those of military age, and influenced the educational opportunities of youth in both war and peace. “The Second Phase of War: Youth in U.S. Occupied Japan,” an article stemming from this project, was published in Diplomatic History (November 2022) and received an honorary mention for the 2022 Fass-Sandin Article Prize in English from the Society for the History of Children and Youth.

Hattori is also working on a second book project, which explores the relationship between U.S. military ambitions in East Asia and the development of urban tourism in modern Japan. Building on multiple fields of historical scholarship, including race and gender in colonial settings, immigration and labor, and urban planning, as well as cultural studies scholarship that explores the relationships between military bases and tourism, this project situates U.S. military presence in East Asia after World War II within a broader history of imperial ambitions in the region, including Japanese imperialism and Euro-American commercial interests since the late nineteenth century.

For more about Hattori’s work, please visit www.masakohattori.com

EDUCATION:

• Ph.D., History, Columbia University
• M.A., History, Columbia University
• M.A., American Studies, University of Tokyo
• B.A., American Studies, University of Tokyo

RESEARCH and TEACHING INTERESTS:

• US. political history
• The U.S. in the World
• War and society
• Education, youth and childhood

AWARDS:

• Honorary mention, 2022 Fass-Sandin Article Prize in English, Society for the History of Children and Youth
• Nominee, Bancroft Dissertation Award, Columbia University, 2018
• Finalist, Louis Pelzer Memorial Award, Organization of American Historians, 2017
• American Political History Institute Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Prize, Seventh Annual Boston University Graduate Student American Political History Conference, 2015
• Thompson Award for the Best Senior Thesis in American Studies, American Studies Program, University of Tokyo, 2006

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

Book:

• The Age of Youth: American Society and the Two World Wars (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

Articles:

• “The Second Phase of War: Youth in U.S. Occupied Japan,” Diplomatic History 46, no. 5 (2022): 960–83.
  -Honorary mention, 2022 Fass-Sandin Article Prize in English, Society for the History of Children and Youth
  -Reviewed on H-Diplo
• “Mobilizing American Youth for Total War: The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940,” Nanzan Review of American Studies 39 (2017): 3–22.
• “Preparing for the ‘Next War’: Civil Defense during the Truman Administration,” Pacific and American Studies 9 (2009): 112–27.

Textbook Chapters:

• “The Rise of the U.S. as a Superpower,” in Introduction to History and Culture of the United States, ed. Yasuo Endo and Yuki Oda (Kyoto: Minerva Shobō, 2023). (In Japanese)