Laura Ishiguro

Laura Ishiguro is an Associate Professor in the Department of History within the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She serves as Director of Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies and holds additional affiliations as Faculty Associate at the UBC Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice and Wilson Associate of the Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University.

• PhD, University College London, 2011
• MA, Simon Fraser University, 2008
• BA Honours, University of Victoria, 2006

Her research specializes in British Columbia, Canada, and British imperialism across the 19th-20th centuries, with particular focus on settler colonialism, Nikkei history, and intersections of gender, family, and everyday life. Methodologically innovative, her work explores historical approaches that contribute to building better futures while examining colonial systems through frameworks like networks, affect, and resistance. She has developed significant projects on British Columbia's colonial history and gold rush eras.

Her scholarly output shows consistent engagement with repositioning colonial narratives, particularly through the 2014 BC Studies special issue she co-edited and her Gold Rush initiatives. These projects demonstrate her dual commitment to rigorous historical scholarship and creating accessible research resources, often through digital platforms that engage students in primary source work.

• Killam Teaching Prize (2018)

Dr. Ishiguro supervises Honours and graduate students in Canadian history and comparative colonialism. Her teaching philosophy emphasizes clear, transparent, flexible instruction rooted in genuine care, with courses designed to equip students with meaningful take-away knowledge applicable beyond the classroom. She has developed notable courses including ACAM 300: Dis/Orienting Asian Canada and HIST 305: History of British Columbia.

She directs the Gold Rush Program, which functions as both research laboratory and training ground where undergraduate students work with archival materials related to British Columbia's mid-19th century gold rushes. This initiative provides mentorship in historical research while creating valuable new resources for future scholars through digitization and transcription of primary sources.