Rate My Professor Paul Spickard

Paul Spickard is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also holds affiliate appointments in Asian American Studies, Black Studies, Chicana/o Studies, East Asian Studies, Religious Studies, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, with fields in the United States, China, Japan, and cultural anthropology, an M.A. in U.S. History from Berkeley in 1976, and an A.B. with honors in History from Harvard University in 1973. Spickard joined UCSB as Professor and Chair of Asian American Studies in 1997, became Professor of History in 1999, and has taught at fifteen universities in the United States and abroad, including Harvard, Berkeley, Nankai University in China, the University of Hawai‘i, Oregon State University, the University of Münster in Germany, and International Christian University in Japan.

His research focuses on comparative race and ethnicity, U.S. social and cultural history, immigration, race and colonialism, mixed-race studies, Asian American history, and Pacific Islander Americans. Spickard is author or editor of more than twenty books, including Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in 20th-Century America (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), recipient of the Gustavus Myers Center Outstanding Book Award; Japanese Americans: The Formation and Transformations of an Ethnic Group, revised edition (Rutgers University Press, 2009); Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (Routledge, 2007; second edition 2022); Race in Mind: Critical Essays (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015); Global Mixed Race (New York University Press, 2014); and Red and Yellow, Black and Brown: Decentering Whiteness in Mixed Race Studies (Rutgers University Press, 2017). Among his honors are UCSB's Distinguished Teaching Award (2015) and Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award (2008), the American Studies Association's Richard A. Yarborough Mentoring Award (2013), the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival's Loving Prize (2011), the Faculty Diversity Award (2025), a fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (2025), and a Senior Core Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University (2021-22). The Critical Mixed Race Studies Association established the Paul Spickard Graduate Student Paper Award in 2014. Spickard has contributed to public history as a consultant for a PBS documentary and in campaigns to address racist monuments in California State Parks.