Valerie Matsumoto

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Valerie Matsumoto is a professor of history and Asian American studies at UCLA. She is recognized as a leading scholar in Asian American and U.S. history, specifically in the areas of Japanese American women and community, and Asian American youth culture and art. Matsumoto’s dedication as a historian and teacher has greatly impacted her colleagues and students at UCLA and throughout the academic world.

Matsumoto has been the guest editor of a special issue of Amerasia Journal on histories and historians in the making, and she is co-editor of Over the Edge: Remapping the American West. In addition to her book, Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Farming Community in California she has published articles on oral history within the Japanese American community, Japanese American gender roles and the Nisei women of the 1930s. She is currently completing a book on Nisei youth culture during the Jazz Age and the Great Depression.

Her passion for the fields of history and Asian American studies extends into her commitment to mentoring and advising undergraduate and graduate students and post-doctoral scholars alike. Her impact is broad: since 1993 she has been the chair or member of 26 doctoral committees, more than 52 M.A. thesis committees, and has taught a variety of undergraduate classes on subjects such as Asians in American history and history through foodways.

She also helped to advance the departmentalization of Asian American Studies in 2004, serving for several years as the vice chair and graduate advisor of the field’s interdepartmental program, providing fundamental leadership and guidance. She is credited with providing significant direction in revamping the curriculum and assuring the program’s smooth transition into a new department. Her dedication to student learning is reflected in her selection as the first recipient of the 2006 C. Doris and Toshio Hoshide Distinguished Teaching Prize in Asian American Studies.

Matsumoto is consistently applauded for her commitment to creating an engaging and comfortable classroom atmosphere for her students, and her reputation for innovative coursework resonates not only at UCLA but on the national and international levels. This widespread knowledge of her academic merit is owed in part to her activism on behalf of teaching; she has been involved in sustaining the annual Teaching U.S. Women’s History Workshop at UCLA since 1988. Indeed, Matsumoto is credited with achieving her own noteworthy teaching goal: that of enabling students to see themselves as actors in history, players who will shape the next chapter of historical studies.