Julia ShizuyoÌýPopham
- Ph.D. Student
- ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES AND FOLKLORE
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Pronouns: she / her / hers
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Education
M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Folklore, 2022
B.S., Northwestern University - Music with minors in U.S. History and the Humanities, 2017
Research Interests
Asian American Studies, visual culture, Japanese American history, public humanities
Julia Shizuyo Popham is a PhD Candidate in Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, ¶¶Òõ´«Ã½ÔÚÏß, where her work spans the fields of Asian American Studies, Japanese American history, and visual culture. Julia’s dissertation interprets Japanese migrant Fukunosuke Kusumi’s collection of visual art as a touchstone by which to theorize aesthetic ambiguityand seeing ireiÌýwithin contexts of racial disposability in the American West. By tracing Kusumi’s art through prewar exclusion in Washington (1908-1913), interim detention in California (1942), indefinite incarceration in Colorado (1942- 1945), and afterlives of loss and healing (1945-), the dissertation examines how seemingly innocuous aesthetics reveal marginalized histories, in which dispossessed subjects construct agency and even freedom via the very systems built to keep them down. Julia’s research is supported by a 2025-2026 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship as well as CU ¶¶Òõ´«Ã½ÔÚÏß’s Chancellor Fellowship. Outside of the academy, Julia volunteers with the Amache Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to preserving and interpreting histories of the Amache Wartime Incarceration Camp.
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