Karen J. Leong

Karen J. Leong is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on 20th-century U.S. social and cultural history, exploring intersections of race, gender, and citizenship through popular culture, immigration policy, and transnational frameworks. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Her current projects include Japanese Americans in Transnational Arizona, examining immigrant community-building and transnational empires; American Movements: Understanding the Ideological and Institutional Reasoning for Japanese American and American Indian Relocations, 1940-1970, co-authored with Dr. Myla Vicenti Carpio; and a collaborative work on Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s health with Dr. Kathy Nakagawa and Dr. Aggie Yellow Horse.

Her publications address topics ranging from Japanese American incarceration to post-Katrina community resilience, and she actively engages in community-based oral history projects and K-12 curriculum development.