SUSAN H. KAMEI is the granddaughter of Japanese immigrants. Her maternal grandparents were part of the Japanese classical music community in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, and her paternal grandparents were vegetable farmers in Orange County.

During World War II, her mother and her parents were incarcerated at the Santa Anita Assembly Center in Arcadia, California and at the War Relocation Authority camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Her father, together with his grandparents, parents, and siblings, were detained at the WRA camp known as Poston II in Arizona.

Susan graduated from the University of California, Irvine with B.A. degrees in Russian and Linguistics, summa cum laude, and received her J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center, where she was an editor of the Georgetown law journal Law and Policy in International Business. 

From the time she was in law school in Washington, DC and while she practiced corporate law, Susan was a member of the legislative strategy team for the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) in the successful passage of federal legislation that provided redress to Japanese Americans for their wartime incarceration. She has been recognized for her service in the redress campaign, which included volunteering as National Deputy Legal Counsel for the JACL Legislative Education Committee.

She is an adjunct professor of history at the University of Southern California (USC) in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, teaching a popular undergraduate course she created about the constitutional, historical, and political issues of the Japanese American incarceration and the importance of those issues today. She also is an affiliate faculty of the USC Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Cultures, continuing her research on the Japanese American incarceration experience and serves as the managing director of the USC Spatial Sciences Institute.

Recognized as one of our country’s most prominent scholars on the Japanese American incarceration, she has appeared in national and international broadcasts by news outlets such as NPR, NBC, C-SPAN, BBC, and France 24, and her articles have been published in syndication across the country. She is the recipient of a 2022 USC Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award, a 2023 USC University Club Faculty Recognition Award, and the USC Dornsife 2022 Communicator of the Year Award for the Humanities.

For her contributions to the USC community and for enriching the educations of students of color and LGBTQ students, she received the 2018 USC Undergraduate Student Government Community Achievement Award. She also was recognized for her leadership and service in business, academia, and the community with the “Woman of Courage” Award in 2000 from the Friends of the Los Angeles City Commission on the Status of Women.

Photo by Rebecca Little