Kazuko Suzuki

Bio

Kazuko Suzuki is currently a Visiting Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University and is an affiliated faculty member in the Program of Ethnicity, Race and Migration. She is also an Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University. Kazuko Suzuki was born in Japan. After working for a Japanese company for several years, she came to the United States for her graduate education. She received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University in November 2003.

She specializes in International Migration, Race and Ethnic Relations (both U.S. domestic and international comparisons), Gender and Sexuality, and East Asian (Japanese) Studies. She has fieldwork experience in Japan and Russia, as well as in the United States. She is interested in “invisible” social oppression against minority groups such as immigrants, racial minorities, and women in Asia. Her research interests include: modes of incorporation and immigrant adaptation from an international comparative perspective; historical and regional analysis of ‘race’ beyond the Western paradigm, as well as cross-disciplinary analysis of ‘race’; human trafficking in women to the U.S. and Japan; and gender and sexuality in Japanese popular culture media, in particular Yaoi/BL.

She was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), Stanford University, in 2009-10. She was a Visitor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton in 2008-09. Previously, she lectured at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute (WEAI) at Columbia University. She was also an Abe Fellow of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), a postdoctoral fellow in the Expanding East Asian Studies Program (ExEAS) at Columbia University, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS) at the University of California, San Diego. For more information, please visit http://huamei2303.wix.com/kazukosuzukihomepage.

Representative Publications

Suzuki, Kazuko. 2016. Divided Fates: The State, Race, and Korean Immigrants’ Adaptation in Japan and the United States. Lanham: Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. [Winner of the 2017 Book Award on Asia/Transnational from the Asia and Asian American Section of the American Sociological Association] https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739129555/Divided-Fates-The-State-Race-and-Korean-Immigrants’-Adaptation-in-Japan-and-the-United-States

Suzuki, Kazuko and Diego von Vacano, eds. (forthcoming). Reconsidering Race: Social Science Perspectives on Racial Categories in the Age of Genomics, Oxford University Press.

Kazuko Suzuki. 2017. “A Critical Assessment of Comparative Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity Vol. 3 (3): 287-300. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2332649217708580

Suzuki, Kazuko. 2015. “What Can We Learn from Japanese Professional BL Writers?: A Sociological Analysis of Yaoi/BL Terminology and Classifications,” in Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture and Community in Japan, edited by Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi: 93-118.