For non-Columbia affiliates, registration is required to access the Morningside campus. After registering you will receive an email with a QR code that must be presented along with a government-issued ID (your name must match exactly the name registered for the event) at either the 116th Street & Broadway or 116th Street & Amsterdam gates for entry. Please register using a unique email address (one email address per registrant) by 4:00 pm on Oct. 5 for campus access.
Names will be submitted for QR codes 1-2 days prior to the event. Registrants will receive an email from CU Guest Access with the QR code before or on the day of the event. NOTE: You cannot access campus using the QR code from Eventbrite.
Speaker: Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland, Associate Professor of French and Director of Asian Studies, Texas Christian University
Moderator: Sarah Kovner, Senior Research Scholar in the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace, Columbia University
After Pearl Harbor, French colonial authorities acting on de Gaulle's orders seized more than a thousand Japanese civilians from Tahiti, the New Hebrides, and New Caledonia and shipped them to internment camps in Australia — a history that has gone largely unexamined. Working from internee letters, descendant interviews, and military archives in three languages, Ireland recovers the mixed-race Japanese-Melanesian families broken apart by that seizure, and follows the detainees from enemy aliens in wartime Australia to strangers in a postwar Japan most had never known. Dr. Benjamin Ireland situates the French Pacific within a wider architecture of racialized incarceration reaching to the Japanese American camps.
Speaker's Bio: Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland is Associate Professor of French and Director of Asian Studies at Texas Christian University. A multilingual historian of transpacific migration and French colonialism with an MBA, he integrates cultural inquiry with economic and legal perspectives across the Asia-Pacific. He is also a J.D. candidate at the University of Hawaiʻi William S. Richardson School of Law, focusing on Pacific Islander rights and legal advocacy.
This event is part of the 2026-2027 lecture series Beyond Internment: Incarceration and Empire in the Pacific.
This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
To purchase a copy of Dr. Ireland's book, Voices Beyond the Grave: Japanese Internment in the French Pacific, please click here: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/voices-beyond-the-grave-japanese-internment-in-the-french-pacific/.
Registration: To attend this event in-person, please register HERE.
