Email: sgomez@scu.edu
Education
2018 University of Chicago
Ph.D., Department of History
2014 University of Chicago
M.A., Department of History
2011 University of California, Berkeley
B.A., high distinction, Department of History
2008 Antelope Valley College
A.A. honors, Letters, Arts, and Sciences
Sonia C. Gomez is Assistant Professor of History at Santa Clara University interested in race and ethnic relations; migration and diaspora; and gender and sexuality. Her first book project Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America (NYU Press) examines the ways in which marriage created pockets of legal and social inclusion for Japanese women during the period of racial exclusion. The book traces the ways that gender and sexuality intersected with race and ethnicity to produce categories of inclusion/exclusion for the Japanese in America.
Her next project tentatively titled, Across Barbed Wire and Racial Lines, explores Japanese American incarceration through the multiracial intimacies and formations that challenged the racial logic of wartime incarceration. Specifically, the project explores interracial female friendship, girlhood, and resistance during incarceration.
Professor Gomez was a Pre-doctoral Fellow with a joint appointment in History, and Global Studies and Languages at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University before coming to Santa Clara University.
Lower-division
HIST 60: Race & Immigration in the United States
HIST 96B: The United States from 1877 to 9/11
Hist 11A/12A: Comparative History of Transnational Migration
Upper-division
HIST 119: Gender, Sexuality & Social Movements in the 20th century United States
Cross-listed with the Department of Ethnic Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies
HIST 105: Interracial Intimacy: Race & Sex in Modern America
Cross-listed with the Department of Ethnic Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies
“The Politics of Afro-Asian Intimacies in ‘Jim Crow Tokyo’.” Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Fall 2019), pp. 35-65.
“‘Yankee, Why Does a Big Man Like You Fear My Baby?’: The Gendered Politics of the Anti- Japanese Movement, 1908-1024,” Amerasia, Vol. 46, No. 2 (August 2020), pp 162-179.
A Gendered Diaspora: Intimacy and Empire in the Making of Japanese America, 1908-1952 (book manuscript under contract at NYU Press)
“Interracial Friendship Across Barbed Wire: Mollie Murphy and Japanese American Incarceration (solicited/submitted for edited series, Leiden University Press)
Mr. Kay, Contingent Magazine (April 2019)
The Sound of the Japanese Diaspora: An Interview with G Yamazawa, Discover Nikkei (April 2019)
Why Women Have Become Targets in the Immigration Fight, Washington Post (March 2019)
Hapa Music is Black and Brown: Jhené Aiko and the Problem of Multiracial Self-Representation, Discover Nikkei (January 2019)