Jane Komori
Assistant Professor
Jane Komori is Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Labor, Migration, and Racial Capitalism. Her research focuses on labor in primary resource industries in the Anglo colonial world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Her first book, under contract with University of California Press, examines the labor history and self-organization of Asian immigrant and Indigenous workers in western Canada’s key primary resource industries – coal mining, salmon fishing, logging, and agriculture – from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, arguing that workers were racialized according to the role they played in the labor process that was transforming the region’s environment.
Jane’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in American Quarterly, Amerasia, Labour/Le Travail, Radical History Review, Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, Critical Ethnic Studies, Asia-Pacific Journal, and Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences. Her article, “‘It could not be an ordinary labour union’: Race, class, exclusion, and the Japanese Camp and Mill Workers Union, 1920–1941,” won the Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies’ 2026 Best Article in Labour/Le Travail Prize and the Canadian Committee on Labour History’s 2026 Article Prize. Jane is a founding editor of Long-Haul, a quarterly magazine of worker writing, and she serves on the editorial boards of BC Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Historical Materialism: Workers and Capital, and Labour/Le Travail.