Courtney Sato is a Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching engage Asian American Studies, transnational American Studies, and the intellectual and cultural histories of the Pacific. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Prior to joining Tufts, Dr. Sato was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.

Dr. Sato’s first book, Pacific Projections: Transpacific Feminisms and Internationalist Visions (under contract with Duke University Press), offers a new history of interwar Pacific internationalism by foregrounding the epistemic, visual, and gendered intellectual labor of Asian and Asian American women. Tracing transpacific circuits of mobility, the book argues that Pacific internationalism was not merely a derivative of Euro-Atlantic models but a distinctive, contested, and embodied formation.

Her work has appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and Qui Parle. Based on her grandmother’s experiences as a nisei (second-generation Japanese American) tuberculosis nurse in Hawaiʻi, Dr. Sato’s next project examines Japanese American tuberculosis patients confined in segregated sanatoria during World War II and the gendered care of tuberculosis nursing and healthcare.

Dr. Sato previously curated the 2016 exhibit “Out of the Desert: Resilience and Memory in Japanese American Internment” at Yale Sterling Memorial Library. Following this exhibit, she served as Co-PI and Project Director for the Out of the Desert digital project (https://outofthedesert.yale.edu), which interprets the history of World War II Japanese American incarceration for a broad public audience.

Her research has been supported by the Association of American University Women (AAUW), the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.