James Chiyoki Ikeda is an educator, historian, and musical artist 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 dissertation (in progress) concerns the ‘afterlives’ of the US Third World Left from 1973 to 2003, specifically the various different ways American leftists of color understood their own national liberatory projects as part of a global liberatory project that blended antiracism with anticolonialism after the Vietnam War.
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 the Historical Research Associate at Black History in Action for Cambridgeport, alongside director Kris Manjapra. Each summer he co-teaches an 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.
