Dr Rashaad Eshack
- Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2025-2026
Contact
About
My journey to Japanese history was a circuitous one. Drawn to Japan by the allure of something new, I traveled to its shores for the first time in 2012. After years of living in Japan, Europe, and the United States, I found myself in 2020, now trained as a modern historian of Japan, embarking on a new challenge: a Cambridge PhD.
Over my time at Cambridge, I have travelled extensively for archival fieldwork, given several academic talks, and published my work, all in the pursuit of the questions that guide my research: What happened to citizenship when it traveled across the Japanese Pacific World? How can we reshape where the boundaries of modern Japan really lie?
After recently graduating, I rejoined the Faculty as a PostDoc. Now I ride the rollercoaster of professional academic life. I teach a variety of courses in Japanese studies, conduct my research on overseas Japanese communities, and enjoy supervising our excellent students.
Research
My research asks: what does citizenship look like when it is lived across borders? I focus on the interwar Japanese world and the overseas communities that connected the Japanese Empire to the wider Pacific. In my research, I show how Japanese schools became more than educational institutions. Instead, they were tools of imperial influence that worked to define a set of civic and moral responsibilities for "nikkei citizens".
I examine how overseas educators and community leaders worked alongside Japanese imperial institutions to articulate what I describe as “nikkei citizenship.” This was not a legal category, but a framework that sought to maintain a connection to Japan within life in another nation-state. Education provided the infrastructure through which these layered responsibilities were codified and disseminated.
More broadly, my work contributes to the transnational history of empire, migration studies, and the global history of citizenship. Across my work, I return to a simple but difficult question: how far can we stretch the boundaries of the “Japanese World”?
Publications:
2024. “Temples of Virtue: Crafting Nikkei Citizenship in 1930’s Japanese Language Schools in Peru.” The Annual Review of Migration Studies, no. 30.
Teaching and supervision
Current Teaching:
JM1 - Theories and Methodologies in Japanese Studies
J17 - Topics in Modern Japanese History: Power, State, People
J12 - Modern Japanese Texts 3: Translation