Masako Hattori is a historian of the twentieth-century United States. Her academic interests include war and society, social policy, imperialism and nationalism, U.S. foreign relations, transnational history, as well as education, youth, and childhood. She is particularly interested in exploring how war and military matters shape lives and societies. She received her Ph.D. in history from Columbia University (New York, U.S.A.), where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft Dissertation Award from the university. An essay stemming from the dissertation was a finalist for the 2017 Louis Pelzer Memorial Award from the Organization of American Historians. She was based at Princeton University for the 2025-26 academic year as a Fung Global Fellow at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. 

Her first monograph, The Age of Youth: American Society and the Two World Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2025), challenges a widely accepted idea in U.S. historiography—that in the first half of the twentieth century, American society was affected by military affairs only briefly and during times of war—by combining the histories of U.S. foreign relations, U.S. social policy, and youth and education. It demonstrates how fluctuations in national security concerns throughout this period shaped adults’ perceptions of young people, particularly those of military age, and influenced the educational opportunities of youth in both war and peace. The book won the Shimizu Hiroshi Book Award (the first book award) from the Japanese Association for American Studies (JAAS), one of the largest academic associations for American Studies outside the United States with roughly 1,000 members. “The Second Phase of War: Youth in U.S. Occupied Japan,” an article stemming from this project, was published in Diplomatic History (November 2022) and received an honorable mention for the 2022 Fass-Sandin Article Prize in English from the Society for the History of Children and Youth.

Hattori is currently working on her second book project, which explores the relationship between U.S. military ambitions in East Asia and the development of urban tourism in modern Japan. Building on multiple fields of historical scholarship, including race and gender in colonial settings, immigration and labor, and urban planning, as well as cultural studies scholarship that explores the relationships between military bases and tourism, this project situates U.S. military presence in East Asia after World War II within a broader history of imperial ambitions in the region, including Japanese imperialism and Euro-American commercial interests since the late nineteenth century.

For more about Hattori’s work, please visit www.masakohattori.com