Franklin Odo

Dr. Franklin S. Odo (born 1939) is a Japanese American author, scholar, activist, and historian. Dr. Odo has served as the director of the Asian Pacific American Program at the Smithsonian Institution since the program’s inception in 1997. As the director of the APA Program, Dr. Odo has brought numerous exhibits to the Smithsonian highlighting the experiences of Chinese Americans, Native Hawaiians, Japanese Americans, Filipino Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Korean Americans, and Indian Americans. He is also the only Asian Pacific American curator at the National Museum of American History.

Franklin Odo was born in and grew up in Honolulu Hawaii and was the first from Kaimuki High School to attend Princeton University, where he received his B.A. in Asian Studies (China and Japan) in 1961. He then received his M.A. in East Asia regional studies at Harvard University in 1963. He returned to Princeton University, where he completed a doctorate dissertation on Japanese feudalism in 1975.

While his academic background and training had been in traditional Asian Studies, Dr. Odo became involved in the movement that created Asian American Studies and other ethnic studies in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a result of the anti-war and anti-racism activism in the United States.

Dr. Odo has taught for over 30 years at numerous academic institutions, most recently at Amherst College and the University of Maryland, College Park. In the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Odo taught at Occidental College; the University of California, Los Angeles; and California State University, Long Beach. In the 1990s, he served as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Hunter College, Princeton University, and Columbia University. He has also served as the director of ethnic studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

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