Yukari Takai

Yukari Takai is establishing herself as an expert on the history of migration and demographic change. Her most recent study of migratory patterns into and throughout the Quebec/New England region in the 19th and 20th centuries offers a new framework for examining the immigrant experience. She has studied and taught in Canada and Japan, and as a Fulbright Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University in New York City.

Her current research concerns Asian transborder migration along the Canadian and Mexican Border during the Period of Exclusion (1882-1943), and gender, work and migration (Asians and French Canadians in the Twentieth Century).

She was a contributor to Migrants and Migration in Modern North America: Cross-Border Lives, Labor Markets, and Politics (eds. D. Hoerder and N. Faires, Duke University Press, 2011) and is the author of Gendered Passages: French-Canadian Migration to Lowell, Massachusetts, 1900-1920 (Peter Lang, 2008).

Representative Publications

Gendered Passages: French-Canadian Migration to Lowell, Massachusetts, 1900-1920. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

“Negotiating the Transpacific Passages: Japanese Migrants, Steamship Companies, and State Regulators in Early-Twentieth-Century Pacific Northwest,” The Journal of American Ethnic History. 30, no. 3 (March 2011): 7-34.

“Asian Migrants, Exclusionary Laws, and Transborder Migration in North America, 1880-1940,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History 23 (October 2009): 35-42.

“Transcending the National in Migration History in North America,” Labour/Le Travail 77 (Spring 2016): 243-256.

“Ambivalence of Return Home: Revaluating Transnational Trajectories of Filipina Live-In Domestic Workers and Caregivers in Toronto from 1970 to 2010” with Mary Gene De Guzman. In Dirk Hoerder, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk and Silke Neusinger eds., Towards a Global History of Domestic Workers and Caregivers: 222-241. The Brill series Studies in Global Social History. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2015.