Awards

Titled Professor - 2019 - 2024

Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor of History and American Studies

About Karen Inouye

Karen Inouye earned her Ph.D. in American studies from Brown University. Inouye currently serves as the Ruth Normal Halls Professor, an associate professor, and the chairperson of the Department of American Studies at Indiana University (IU).

Inouye’s research interests include Asian American and Asian Canadian studies, transnational American studies, the afterlife of wartime incarceration, and wartime prison on Native land. In 2016, she wrote a book titled “The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration” which reexamines the history of imprisonment of U.S. and Canadian citizens of Japanese descent during World War II.

Throughout her robust career, Inouye has been recognized as an influential educator and researcher with an array of awards and grants. She received a research grant from the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (201(2019-2020), a College of Arts and Humanities Institute Research Fellowship (2017), and a New Frontiers relativity and Scholarship Research Fellowship (2017-2018), among several others. She was awarded a Trustees’ Teaching Award from IU in 2013 and 2015 to recognize her outstanding teaching at Indiana University.