Lakeside School

Lakeside will host scholar, author, and Lakeside alum Megan Asaka ’99 on Wednesday, March 18, for the Dan Ayrault Memorial Lecture.

Asaka is an award-winning scholar, writer, and teacher of Asian American history at University of California, Riverside. She is the author of “Seattle from the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City” (University of Washington Press, 2022), which examines the erased histories of the immigrant communities that built Seattle.

The book was inspired by Asaka’s own family history in Seattle, as well as her work as an oral historian and archivist at Densho, a community-based organization that seeks to preserve and share the stories of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II.

“In her book, Asaka reshapes how we understand this city by centering the migrant workers—Indigenous workers, Asian immigrants, and other footloose laborers—who powered Seattle’s early economy but were often left out of its story,” says Upper School history teacher Betsy Pingree, PhD., who is teaching the book in the Upper School history elective, Seattle Culture and History. “As both a scholar of Seattle and a resident of this place, I consider her work essential reading in my course because it reveals how systems of labor, law, and exclusion built the city we live in. Asaka’s work reminds us that this history is not distant or abstract but instead continues to shape opportunity, belonging, and power in Seattle today.”

“Not only is Asaka a compelling scholar whose work is surfacing important narratives of our past, but she is also a friend to our students and has been a generous visitor and contributor to several Lakeside classrooms,” says Upper School history teacher James Nau. “Her work has been a gift to our region and our Lakeside students.”

Asaka is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Riverside where she specializes in Asian American history, urban history, and public humanities. She earned a doctorate in American Studies (with distinction) from Yale University, as well as a masters in American Studies with a concentration in Public Humanities from that university; additionally she graduated from Brown University with a bachelor’s in ethnic studies. You can read and listen more about Asaka’s work in this piece from KUOW from 2022.

The lecture starts at 7 p.m., with doors opening at 6:30 p.m. Lectures are free of charge and open to all members of the community. Registration is requested so that we can best prepare for the event, and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Register here.

We hope to see you there!