Monday, October 5, 2026

5:30 PM - 8:00 PM

Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Dr. Emily Anderson’s career trajectory combines scholarly research on transnational Japan with over 25 years of experience in public history. She has worked on numerous exhibits at multiple institutions, including the Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles). She most recently led the research stage for a major project on Japanese American food. Other exhibits include Don’t Fence Me In: Coming of Age in America’s Concentration Camps (2023) and (with USC) Sutra and Bible: Faith and the Japanese American World War II Incarceration (2022-2023). At the San Diego Museum of Us, she created Cannibals: Myth and Reality (March 2016 - ongoing). She is also a scholar of religion and empire in Japan, and has published on Christianity in Japan, the Japanese empire, and Japanese immigrants before World War II. Her publications include Christianity in Modern Japan: Empire for God (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Belief and Practice in Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) as well as articles and book chapters on religion and imperialism in Japan and the Pacific. She dual majored in Literature and Philosophy at CMC (’99). She holds a PhD in modern Japanese history from UCLA (2010)