Dr. John Streamas
Biography
Born in Tokyo during a polio scare and raised in post-industrial southwestern Ohio, John Streamas is the first person in his family to complete high school. He earned undergraduate and master's degrees in English. He taught various writing courses in various schools for more than sixteen years before earning a PhD in American Culture Studies and a graduate certificate in Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University. His research and writing have earned a grant from the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, the American Studies Association's Wise-Susman Prize, and his university's Distinguished Dissertation Award. He is also one of six "New Voices in American Studies" featured in a University of Wyoming symposium. He and his wife Valerie Boydo keep three cats, thousands of books, and hundreds of goofy toys.
Publications
Streamas has published stories, poems, journalism, and reviews. Among his published critical work are studies of assimilationism and tokenism in university culture, Karl Yoneda and Japanese American activism, the teaching of class in introductory Ethnic Studies courses, Melanesians in Terrence Malick's film The Thin Red Line, and history and memory in two films about Japanese American wartime incarceration. His book Japanese Americans and Cultures of Effacement is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.
Research interests
Streamas's interests include racism, poverty, narrative, time and space, and social justice.
Teaching interests
Streamas teaches introductory Ethnic Studies and Asian Pacific American Studies as well as Asian Pacific American literature, culture and power, theories of race and ethnicity, Asian Pacific American women, and technologies of time and space. He hopes to develop courses in race and war, race and art, and race in narrative.
Turn-ons: Nerf, bobble-heads, The Patch, cephalopods, world peace.
Turn-offs: War, poverty, hyphens.
