Stephanie Hinnershitz

Stephanie Hinnershitz is an author and historian with the Institute for the Study of War and Democracy at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans. She has previously taught at Valdosta State University and Cleveland State University. In addition to her professorships, her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, the Office of Diversity at the United States Military Academy at West Point, the Library of Congress, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

She is the author of Race, Religion, and Civil Rights: Asian Students on the West Coast, 1900-1968, A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South, and Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor during World War II, which won the 2022 Philip Taft Labor History Award from the Labor and Working Class History Association and Cornell University Industrial Labor Relations School.

Medium History explores memories and moments through creativity and expression, capturing the cultural ethos of that time and place through storytelling and representation. Visual material culture, such as art, and other multimodal forms can elicit responses, emotions, and opinions—human expressions, tied to temporal and cultural aesthetics. This program explores how creative mediums provide context for history beyond dates, and names, and figures.

Partnering with Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University, this series will explore how comics, comic books, and graphic novels from and about the Japanese American Incarceration following Executive Order 9066, humanize the tragic experience, allowing the stories to live long past the lives of those who experienced it, and ensuring this never happens again. Supported by the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a state-funded grant project of the California State Library, this series is designed to be a companion to the interactive web project, Images and Imaginings of Internment: Comics and Illustrations of Camp.

Guest: Stephanie Hinnershitz
Hosts: Jon-Barrett Ingels
Produced by: Past Forward