Simeon Man

Simeon Man is a historian of race and empire in the twentieth century United States, and a scholar of American Studies, Asian American Studies, and comparative ethnic studies. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University in 2012. Before joining the faculty at UC San Diego, he was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University and a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities at the University of Southern California.

His first book, “Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific” (University of California Press, 2018), is a cultural history of the U.S. military in Asia and the Pacific after World War II. The book explains how the United States mobilized citizens from nations and territories throughout the region for the U.S. war in Vietnam (1954-1975), and how these soldiers and workers in turn became active participants in the making of U.S. empire and the unfinished struggles for global decolonization. The book received Honorable Mention for the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Prize from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and Honorable Mention for Outstanding Achievement in History from the Association for Asian American Studies. He was also named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians.

He is at work on two book projects, one on contemporary antimilitarism struggles in Guåhan, Okinawa, South Korea, Hawai‘i, and the Philippines, and another on the history of the transpacific nuclear industry and antinuclear movements in the Pacific.

Prof. Man received the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Distinguished Teaching Award in 2019. He teaches introductory courses in Asian American history and U.S. imperial history, and specialized courses in Asian American social movements, race and war in U.S. culture, and United States and the Pacific World. He is an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Program in Critical Gender Studies. He was also the Inaugural Director of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies Program.

• "Teaching 'Race and Oral History in San Diego' during COVID-19: Rethinking Community, Storytelling, and Labor," The Abusable Past, co-authored with Yen Le Espiritu, Adriana Echeverria, and Youngoh Jung (October 2020).
• "Anti-Asian Violence and US Imperialism," Race & Class (first published August 27, 2020).
• Soldiering Through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific, University of California Press (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. Honorable Mention for the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Prize, Immigration and Ethnic History Society.
  Honorable Mention, Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in History, Association for Asian American Studies
• Special issue of Radical History Review, “Militarism and Capitalism: The Work and Wages of Violence,” co-edited with A. Naomi Paik and Melina Pappademos. Issue 133. January 2019.
• "Violent Entanglements: Militarism and Capitalism," introduction to Radical History Review 133, co-authored with A. Naomi Paik and Melina Pappademos.
• “Empire and War in Asian American History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Asian American Studies, edited by Eiichiro Azuma and David K. Yoo, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• “Aloha, Vietnam: Race and Empire in Hawai‘i’s Vietnam War,” American Quarterly 67:4 (December 2015): 1085-1108. Winner of the Constance M. Rourke Prize by the American Studies Association for the best article published in American Quarterly in 2015.
• “Radicalizing Currents: The GI Movement in the Third World,” in The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements Across the Pacific, ed. Moon-Ho Jung (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014).
• Review of The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States by David  C. Atkinson (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). The Pacific Historical Review 87, no. 4.
• Review of Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawaii and the Philippines by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez (Duke University Press, 2013). The Hawaiian Journal of History 49 (December 2015).
• “Transpacific Connections between Two Empires,” review of Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections, Richard S. Kim, The Quest for Statehood, Shelley Sang-Hee Lee, Claiming the Oriental Gateway, and Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire,American Quarterly 66, Number 2 (June 2014): 441-451.