Meet the Mellon Fellows: Dr. Erin Aoyama

Dr. Erin Aoyama

Brown University
PhD, American Studies

Host Site: High Plains Group (Amache National Historic Site, Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site, Capulin Volcano National Monument, and Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site)
Fellowship Title: High Plains Drifter: Inclusive Public Memory on the High Plains
Project Description: Dr. Aoyama will explore the interconnection of trade, tragedy, and public memory that ties these four National Park units together. These histories include those of Indigenous peoples, European colonization, Westward expansion, trade, and agriculture leading to distinct moments of opportunity, tragedy, and persecution.

Bio:

Dr. Aoyama (she/her) is an interdisciplinary historian and public humanities practitioner. Her work is rooted in Asian American studies, relational ethnic studies, and community and public memory. Erin serves on the Board of Directors of a community-based nonprofit called Japanese American Memorial Pilgrimages (JAMP), is co-director of a digital mapping and storytelling project titled "Seeing Memory: Landscapes of Japanese American Incarceration," and is a curatorial assistant at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, CA.

Erin graduated with her PhD in American Studies from Brown University. Her dissertation engaged with the afterlives of Japanese American redress by focusing on Japanese American memory and community formation in New England and in Arkansas, grappling with the legacy of Nisei soldiers, and reckoning with how Japanese American historical storytelling can both hinder and strengthen movements for Black reparations and Native sovereignty. She holds an MA in Public Humanities, also from Brown.

Tell us about your research interests!

My research is driven by questions of memory, community, repair, and reckoning in the afterlives of wartime Japanese American incarceration and redress. My scholarly work traces how community and public memory about wartime Japanese American incarceration formed in the postwar period and in the early years of the redress movement. Through community engagement, oral history interviews, place-based study, and archival work, my research brings together foundational methods in Asian American studies, cultural and intellectual U.S. history, and public humanities to analyze how this memory formation contributed to what redress meant to Japanese Americans who received it, alongside what it meant within larger narratives of U.S. nationalism and identity. My approach to research is relational, in that my work seeks to place Japanese American histories within broader contexts of race and power in the U.S. to stitch together traditionally siloed histories through memory, place, and community. Beyond my academic work, I am interested in how ethical community-engaged research methods can help us to imagine and implement justice-oriented, decolonizing public humanities work.

How does your research connect to the mission of the National Park Service, which serves both parks and communities?

I approach my research through a strong commitment to community engaged public humanities methods that center ethical considerations and community priorities through a non-hierarchical model of knowledge production. In my dissertation work, I combined archival material with critical museum studies approaches and engaged research methods like place-based interviews at memorialization sites and collaborative work with community memory projects, to shift and broaden the histories of World War II and the camps that incarcerated Japanese Americans. Beyond the specific questions that animated my work in grad school, my research more broadly is invested in how sites of public memory can facilitate expansive, empowering, and reparative storytelling through community gatherings, art, and other forms of remembering and creative practice. I look forward to learning from and alongside the communities connected to the NPS sites where I'll be working, and to bringing my own research experience and expertise with me as well.

What are you most excited about as you begin your fellowship?

I am so excited to join in on the challenging and meaningful work at the NPS sites where I'll be based. I'm also really looking forward to being part of a cohort of scholars and practitioners who are also committed to community engaged public work. Finally, I can't wait to meet new folks and communities and to get to know a new region!

Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

This project was made possible through the National Park Service by a grant from the National Park Foundation through generous support from the Mellon Foundation. The Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship program is administered through a partnership between NPS, NPF, and American Conservation Experience.