Associate Sociology Professor Robert Moorehead, Ph.D., is a qualitative researcher and uses ethnographic methods to study the incorporation of Japanese Peruvian immigrants into Japanese society. His work contributes to the growing literature on the role of ethnicity in migration by examining ethnic return migrants’ marginalization in their ancestral homeland and the implications of this marginalization for Japanese ethnicity, nationality, and citizenship. Moreover, his research expands Western theory by adapting it to the specifics of the Japanese case.
At COD, Moorehead's teaching focuses on the sociology of race and racism in the U.S. and Japan. He has also given public talks at local libraries on racism in the U.S.
Before teaching sociology at COD, Moorehead was Member Services director at Kaiser Permanente’s San Francisco Medical Center, an English conversation teacher in Japan and a research coordinator at Stanford University School of Medicine. He also was a Spanish-Japanese interpreter/translator/assistant teacher at a Japanese elementary school, where he did his dissertation research on the incorporation of Peruvian immigrants at the school.
Then he was hired as an associate professor in the College of International Relations at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. For more than four years, he was part of the first faculty in a new Global Studies major that taught an all-English curriculum to students from across the globe.
Contact Moorehead at mooreheadr@cod.edu or (630) 942-2032.
In Sociology, you learn to see the world in new ways, and once you do that, you can’t unsee the new things you’ve seen. There’s no going back.
- Robert Moorehead, Associate Professor, Sociology
Areas of Expertise
- Sociology
- International Relations
- Japanese Peruvians into Japanese Society