Jeannie Shinozuka

Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Research AssociateUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Research Fellow

Biotic Borderlands: Constituting Race in Transnational Public Health and Agriculture, 1880-1945

The book manuscript is on the circulation of plant, insect, and human immigrants across American borders, especially their journey that crisscrossed the Pacific Ocean. Agricultural and public health policies at United States borders co-constituted the concept and practice of race; specifically, biotic exchanges fostered biological nativism. Over half a century of American immigration and border agricultural policies generated public anxieties about biotic exchanges. US border policies about Japanese immigrants, plus their floral and faunal counterparts, transformed American horticulture and agriculture, while revising racial theories. This research contributes to and intervenes in debates in several fields about bodies, borders, contagion, empires, regulation, and science in American, Japanese, ethnic, public health, and environmental studies. A Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science short-term research fellowship shall enable me to excavate a wide array of East Coast archival materials vital to the book-in-progress. The book manuscript will be submitted for publication by 2015. Read more about Shinozuka's Consortium-funded research here.

Updates

Jeannie Shinozuka

Jeannie's book, Biotic Borders, has been published with the University of Chicago Press (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo131341992.html).

Biotic Borders charts the co-production of race and species over half a century in the human and more-than-human worlds, focusing on Japanese plant, insect, and human immigrants across the Pacific Ocean. Situating plants and insects as important actors in histories of the United States empire and a hemispheric context enables the recentering of more-than-human worlds that have enriched understandings of transpacific racisms in Philadelphia and Washington, DC, Hawai‘i, and Latin America. United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials targeted Japanese plant, insect, and human immigrants for fear of San José scale, chestnut blight, citrus canker, the Oriental termite, the Japanese beetle, and other invasions.

Jeannie Shinozuka

Shinozuka has recently been granted a 2014-2016 Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She published an article on Japanese beetles and Japanese immigrant gardeners in the December 2013 issue of American Quarterly.