John Streamas

John Streamas is an associate professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies and graduate director of American Studies and Culture in the School of Languages, Cultures, and Race at Washington State University. His publications include articles on various racial injustices, especially the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, and he is completing a book on racism and nuclear weapons. Streamas was born in Tokyo long after World War II, but his Japanese mother feared that his health issues resulted from radiation fallout after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the United States, Streamas has lived near decaying nuclear facilities: the Fernald plant in southwestern Ohio and now the Hanford plant in southeastern Washington. It feels inevitable to him that his professional work would lead him back to tools of the war that defined his mother’s life and her fears for his.