Hiroshi Kitamura

Background

Hiroshi Kitamura is William E. Pullen Associate Professor of History.  He earned a B.A. in American Studies from Carleton College (1995) and an M.A. (1997) and Ph.D. (2004) in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Hiroshi is the author of Yodogawa Nagaharu: ‘Eiga no dendoshi’ to Nihon no modan [Evangelist of Cinema: Yodogawa Nagaharu and Modern Japan] (Nagoya University Press, 2024) and Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan (Cornell University Press, 2010), which won the Shimizu Hiroshi Book Award from the Japanese Association for American Studies and the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies Book Prize.  Hiroshi has received grants and fellowships from the Japan Foundation, the Toyota Foundation, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Harry S. Truman Library Institute, the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, and the Reves Center for International Studies at William & Mary.  He was recognized with the Plumeri Award of Academic Excellence in 2016.

At William & Mary, Hiroshi teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on “America in the world,” film history, the Cold War, and U.S.-East Asian relations. He is a Co-Principal Investigator of the U.S.-Japan Baseball Diplomacy Project, which examines the role baseball has played in shaping U.S.-Japan relations over the past century and a half.  Sponsored by the U.S. Embassy-Tokyo, this project has culminated in a pair of international symposia, an oral history project involving players, coaches, and experts, as well as a U.S.-Japan little league exchange held in the summer of 2024.  Hiroshi also served as Director of Graduate Studies from 2014 to 2018 and Director of the International Relations program from 2022 to 2025.

Currently, Hiroshi is at work on two book-length projects, one on Hollywood’s Orientalism and East Asia during the Cold War, and another on Japanese cinema during the era of High Growth.