Kaoru Ueda

About

Kaoru (Kay) Ueda is a research fellow and the curator of the Japanese Diaspora Collections at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives.  She holds a B.A. from Kwansei Gakuin University, an MBA from University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from Boston University, and has unique experience both in business and academic worlds. Having worked as an analyst in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom, and in the specialized library of the International Center for East Asian Archaeology and Cultural History, Boston University, she brings an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Japanese diaspora and modern Japan and can unpack the complex interactive processes between Japan and host countries. Dr. Ueda has published in a number of international journals and shed light on overseas Dutch in early modern Indonesia and Japan. She also has extensive experience in organizing scholarly engagement and museum exhibitions.

At Hoover, her bilingual and inter-cultural capacities have helped create the Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection, the world’s largest open-access full-image digital collection of Japanese newspapers published overseas. She edited the volume Fanning the Flames: Propaganda in Modern Japan (Hoover Institution Press, 2021) and curated many of the materials used in the accompanying eponymous exhibition (2021-22) and online exhibition. Dr. Ueda manages the Japanese Diaspora Initiative, endowed by an anonymous gift to promote the study of overseas Japanese history during the Empire of Japan period. She is also the editor of On a Collision Course: The Dawn of Japanese Migration in the Nineteenth Century (Hoover Institution Press, 2020).