James Chiyoki Ikeda is an educator, historian, and songwriter based in Greater Boston.
Ikeda is a PhD candidate in World History at Northeastern University, an adjunct professor at Bunker Hill Community College, and a history teacher at Quincy High School in Quincy, MA.
Ikeda’s forthcoming dissertation (“The Intimate Face of Universal Struggle”: June Jordan’s Politics of Universal Liberation, 1964-2002, in progress) examines how the political project of ‘universal liberation’—the freedom of everyone, everywhere—was continuously rearticulated in different ways in the works of pioneering Black feminist poet and educator June Jordan between 1964 and 2002. Ikeda finds in Jordan’s political/intellectual biography a continuous radical tradition (albeit one expressed through different grammars, including Black nationalism, Black Feminism, anti-imperialism, etc.). He thereby challenges radical intellectual histories which focus on declension, specifically those concerned with the “US Third World Left” or the “Tricontinental Left” and other formations of American leftists of color who understood their own nationally-situated anti-racist liberatory projects as part of a global anti-imperial liberatory project.
Ikeda has presented portions of his dissertation research at Rutger’s University’s Susman Conference (2026), the National Council for Black Studies’ conference (2026), MIT’s Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality conference (2025) and the African American Intellectual History Society’s conference (2025). His most recent publication, “Feeling Right, in Solidarity: Place-Based Performance Loops and Anti-Gentrification in Black CambridgePort,” was co-authored with Dr. Kris Manjapra and published in Harvard University’s Transitions: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora (June 2025)
Ikeda currently holds an MA in History (2022) and an MEd in Learning and Instruction (2014) from Northeastern University, as well as an MA in History from Tufts University (2017), and a BS in Social Studies Education from Boston University (2012). He is an officer on the Executive Council of NERWHA (the New England Regional World History Association) for the 2023-2025 term and has served as an Historical Research Associate at Black History in Action for Cambridgeport, alongside director Kris Manjapra. Since 2019 he has co-taught a yearly summer term honors seminar on political street performance with Dr. Proshot Kalami at Bunker Hill Community College, and he and Kalami also co-taught a related course on activism as part of Team Harmony’s Virtual Institute for Activism in 2021 through Emerson College.
Ikeda also co-founded the Bummer City Historical Society, a Boston-based arts and civic engagement community organization; fronts the Boston-based punk band The Michael Character; performs original history lectures with an improvisational contemporary classical backing band as MCtheProfessor.GOV; and has coached youth poetry for a decade.
