Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland, Ph.D.
b.ireland@tcu.edu817-257-6356Scharbauer Hall 3207 (map link)
Program Affiliations
Education
Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
B.A., Davidson College
Courses Taught
Asia and French Empire: Postcolonial Indochina, Oceania, and Postwar Japan
Race, Death, and Photography: Visual Culture of the Holocaust and the Algerian War
Transnational Feminisms: Queer Readings from Francophone North Africa to the Caribbean
Carceral Visualities: Critical Theory Seminar on Transnational Violence
Intersectionalities: Gender and Sexuality in the French Colonies
Islands and Archipelagoes: Environmental Politics and Decolonization
Paris-Tokyo: Literary and Cinematic Visions
Asia in Francophone Societies: Postcolonial Vietnam to Postmodern Japan
Identity: Friendship, Love, and Deception in French Literature (Premodern to Modern
Literature)
Introduction to French Literature
Advanced French Composition
Introduction to French Composition
Advanced French Grammar and Contemporary France
Early Advanced French through Film
Intermediate French through Film
Intensive Review of Elementary French
Elementary French
Elementary Japanese Language
Late Intermediate Japanese Language
Advanced Japanese Language
Introduction to University Life
Areas of Focus
Dr. Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland is Associate Professor and Coordinator of French Studies and serves as Director of Asian Studies. Dr. Ireland holds faculty affiliations in the John V. Roach Honors College, in Women
and Gender Studies, Comparative Race & Ethnic Studies, and Middle East Studies programs.
Currently, he teaches all levels of French and Japanese while overseeing the Japanese language sequence at TCU.
Raised in Kurashiki, Japan, and New Orleans, Louisiana, Dr. Ireland received his Ph.D.
in French from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and completed his B.A. (Phi
Beta Kappa, High Honors) in French and East Asian Studies at Davidson College. He
pursued comparative French and Japanese literary studies at the Université Paris IV-Sorbonne,
Université Paris VII-Diderot, and at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. He was an
invited fellow at the Institute of French Cultural Studies at Dartmouth and has lectured
as a Visiting Professor for the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. Dr. Ireland
has served as a consultant for The New York Times, The Japan Times, and for other international media. His CV can be found here.
Since 2018, Dr. Ireland’s humanitarian project has involved reuniting descendants of Japanese civilian internees held in Australian internment camps during World War II with their long-lost family members in Japan. This project has gained worldwide press coverage, and Dr. Ireland has worked with numerous government representatives and journalists in Japan, France, and New Caledonia to reunite these families long separated by war. TCU Endeavors covers this project in depth here.
His research and teaching explore the fields of Critical Ethnic Studies, Francophone literature, Asian American Pacific Islander Native Hawaiian (AAPINH) Studies, Transpacific Studies, Transnational Holocaust Historiography, Postcolonial/Empire Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and DEI-focused Pedagogy. His book, Voices Beyond the Grave: Japanese Internment in the French Pacific (accepted for publication with University of Hawaiʻi Press), examines a transnational Second World War history of Japanese diaspora, incarceration, and internment in the French South Pacific and Australia in which French colonial authorities imprisoned over a thousand Japanese emigrants residing in various French territories in Australian internment camps. Engaging a breadth of multilingual, declassified military documents archived in Japanese, French, and English languages, Voices Beyond the Grave explores the impacts that both Melanesian/Indigenous-Japanese coalitions and transnational carceral policies had on hybridized, mixed-race Japanese communities under Charles de Gaulle’s Pacific regime.
Dr. Ireland has presented at international conferences and DEI university keynotes, having published articles in the leading peer-reviewed journals of his field, including French Historical Studies, International Journal of Francophone Studies, Contemporary Journal of French and Francophone Studies, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, among others.
Currently, Dr. Ireland serves on the editorial board of Edinburgh University Press's Diversity, Decolonization, and Queer Francophone Studies series and the advisory board of Barthes Studies. Other professional engagements include serving as Senior Peer-Review referee and consultant for The International Academic Forum Think Tank. At TCU, he is the Faculty Director of the on-campus French immersion community, La Maison Française. Students interested in living in a French language community at TCU are invited to contact Dr. Ireland for more information regarding housing opportunities.
For a more comprehensive bibliography, please see my CV.
- “LGBTQIA+ Movements in Japan: Queer(ing) Japanese Culture?” TCU 150th AAPINH Heritage Week lecture, sponsored by TCU Department of Women and Gender Studies, TCU Intercultural Center. April 12, 2023.
- “From the Asia Pacific to Algeria: Carceral Memories of Japanese and North African Internment” at the Prisoners of the Asia-Pacific War: History, Memory, and Forgetting International Symposium, Kyoto, Japan, February 7, 2023.
- “Hauntological Utopias and Literary Indigeneity: Tahiti and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF)” at the International Multidisciplinary Symposium (Utopia and Migration: Renewing the Imagination of Borders in the 21st Century), Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, Oxford University; Oxford, UK. 2021.
- “Rage against Nuclear N/Oceans: Chantal Spitz and Henri Hiro’s Poetic Voices in French Polynesia.” International conference sponsored by the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, Cambridge University; Cambridge, UK. 2020.
- “Roland Barthes’s Rendez-vous sans paroles: Queer Folds in the Archive.” Kyushu University. International conference sponsored by the Department of French Literature. Fukuoka, Japan. 2019.
- “The Pacific Islands: Environmental Activism and the American University.” AddRan Back-to-Class Public Event. Texas Christian University. Fort Worth. 2019.
- “The Japanese of New Caledonia: Mixed Race Histories of Ethnocide in the French Pacific and Australia.” Asian Studies Association of Australia. University of Sydney, Australia. 2018.
- “Mixed Race Poetics of the Francophone Indian Ocean: Afrasian Animal-Maroons.” MLA Convention. New York City, New York. 2018.
- “East Asian Diasporas in Francophone Oceania: Vanishing Ethnicities, Preserving Voices.” MLA Convention. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 2017.
- “Marcel Proust’s Queer Japan.” International Asian Studies Conference. Institute of Asian Cultural Studies of the International Christian University. Tokyo, Japan. 2016.
- “Ook Chung’s Kimchi: Foodways in the Francophone Nippo-Korean Novel.” Appetites: Discourses of Consumption. University of Michigan Comparative Literature Conference. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 2016.
- “Queering Photography: Race, Sexuality, and Coloniality in Camera Lucida and A Lover’s Discourse.” Roland Barthes at 100: International Conference Marking Centenary of Roland Barthes. Cardiff University. Cardiff, Wales. 2015.
Last Updated: November 19, 2024