Dr. Mika Thornburg is a Postdoctoral Fellow of Global Asias in the Asian Studies Program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She is a historian and Asian Americanist interested in postwar transpacific empire and public history. Her research examines tourism, colonialism, gender and US-Japan relations in the postwar Pacific. Her work interrogates the possibilities and limitations of tourism, particularly in the transimperial system of the postwar Pacific. It reframes Cold War US-Japan relations as symbiosis between two imperial nations. Her work has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and the Mellon Foundation.
Mika values collaboration and partnership in her public-facing work as well as her work in the classroom. She has taught a wide range of classes in history and Asian American Studies. She has worked on several public history projects, including designing an exhibit and education curricula on Santa Barbara’s Chinese American history with the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation. She also served as the 2023-2024 Assistant Reviews Editor for The Public Historian. When she’s not teaching, writing, or researching, she loves hiking with her partner, Bryan, and her dog, Pepper.