Jeannie Shinozuka

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

2014 to 2015
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.