Sarah Griffith

• Assistant Professor , History Department
• College of Arts and Sciences

Dr. Sarah Griffith teaches courses in mid to late-19th and 20th-century United States history with specializations in comparative race and ethnicity, Asian American studies, and Pacific Rim transnationalisms. She also offers survey courses on US immigration history, East Asian Civilizations, and teaches the survey in United States history, 1865-present. Dr. Griffith teaches as well in the CORE program, Queens’ interdisciplinary general education program.

Dr. Griffith’s research interests include the study of comparative anti-racism movements that shaped US history from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s. In her forthcoming book to be published by the University of Chicago Press, Dr. Griffith uses the 1920s Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast to explore the foundations of American liberal Protestant anti-racism in the Pacific, Japanese American and Chinese American transnationalism in the interwar period, and the ways in which these agendas intersected and diverged from anti-racism efforts shaping black-white anti-racism efforts in the same period. Her next project will explore liberal Protestant missionaries who served in Japan prior to the 1930s. She will focus on missionaries as interlocutors of American and Japanese cultures in both Japan and the United States and study how missionaries sought to impose gendered notions of middle-class, white American identity on Japanese subjects prior to their immigration to the United States.

In addition to these current projects, Dr. Griffith has published articles and book reviews in the Western Historical Quarterly, the Pacific Historical Review, and the Oregon Historical Quarterly.

Degrees

• Ph.D.  - Modern U.S. History; University of California, Santa Barbara