Daryl Joji Maeda

  • Professor
  • Dean, College of Arts & Sciences
  • ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES
Address

Office Location: Ketchum 275

Pronouns: he / him / his

Office Hours

 

Education

Ph.D., University of Michigan - American Culture, 2001
M.A., University of Michigan - American Culture, 1996
M.A., San Francisco State University - Ethnic Studies, 1993
B.S., Harvey Mudd College - Mathematics, 1989

Research Interests

Asian American history and studies, comparative ethnic studies, radical social movements, the 1960s and 70s, transnational culture


As an interdisciplinary cultural historian, I explore how racial identities and politics are embedded within and expressed through cultural productions. My main research concerns revolve around social and cultural movements for racial justice of the late 1960s and early 1970s. My newest book, Like Water: A Cultural History of Bruce Lee, shows how Bruce Lee’s rise to global superstardom was impelled by transnational cultural exchanges in the transpacific, a zone structured by colonialism, capitalism, and militarism. Rethinking the Asian American Movement, which is a synthesis of scholarship on the Asian American movement of the 60s and 70s, argues that the movement was inherently built upon commitments to interracial and transnational solidarities. My first book, Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America, shows how the category of “Asian American,” which encompasses Asians of many ethnicities in the U.S., was created by Asian American movement and thoroughly imbued with anti-racist and anti-imperialist political commitments.


Selected Publications

Books

Maeda, Daryl. Like Water: A Cultural History of Bruce Lee. NYU Press, 2022.

Maeda, Daryl. Rethinking the Asian American Movement.  American Social and Political Movements of the Twentieth Century series, Routledge, 2011.

Maeda, Daryl. Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America.  Critical American Studies series, University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Refereed Articles

Moses, Michele S., Daryl J. Maeda, and Christina H. Paguyo. “Racial Politics, Resentment, and Affirmative Action: Asian Americans as ‘Model’ College Applicants.” Journal of Higher Education.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2018.1441110

Daryl Joji Maeda.  “Nomad of the Transpacific: Bruce Lee as Method.”  American Quarterly 69, no. 3 (September 2017), 741-761.

Maeda, Daryl. “Black Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen: Constructing Asian American Identity through Performing Blackness, 1969-1972.”  American Quarterly 57, no. 4 (December 2005): 1079-1103.  Winner of the Constance M. Rourke Prize by the American Studies Association for the best article published in American Quarterly in 2005.

Edited Collections

Arturo Aldama, Elisa Facio, Daryl Maeda, and Reiland Rabaka, eds.  Enduring Legacies: Ethnic Histories and Cultures of Colorado.  University Press of Colorado, 2011.

Contributions to Edited Collections

Maeda, Daryl. “Documenting the Third World Student Strike, the Anti-War Movement, and the Emergence of Second-Wave Feminism from Asian American Perspectives.” In Cambridge History of Asian American Literature, eds. Min Song and Rajini Srikanth (Cambridge University Press, in press), 221-36.

Maeda, Daryl. “Documenting the Third World Student Strike, the Anti-War Movement, and the Emergence of Second-Wave Feminism from Asian American Perspectives.” In Cambridge History of Asian American Literature, eds. Min Song and Rajini Srikanth (Cambridge University Press, in press), 221-36. 

Maeda, Daryl. “Movement.” In Keywords for Asian American Studies, eds. Cathy Schlund-Vials, Linda Trinh Vo, and K. Scott Wong (New York: NYU Press, 2015), 165-168. 

Maeda, Daryl. “Before the Birth of Asian America: Asian Americans and the New Left.” In A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times, eds. Howard Brick and Gregory Parker (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, 2015), 301-317.

Maeda, Daryl. “The Asian American Movement.”  In Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s, ed. Heather Thompson (New York: Prentice Hall, 2009).