MA Program Faculty & Staff

Tomoko Takahashi joined Soka University of America, Calabasas in 1992. In February 1994, she was appointed as the university’s first dean of the graduate school to direct the master of arts degree program in second and foreign language education. In 2001 she was appointed as SUA’s first provost to serve as the chief academic officer of the university, overseeing both the graduate and undergraduate academic programs through 2014. She currently serves as vice president for institutional research and assessment, as well as dean of the graduate school. In 2015 Dr. Takahashi was elected to the WASC Senior College and University Commission. As SUA’s accreditation liaison officer since 2001, a frequent visiting committee member since 2008, and as a commissioner, she has gained valuable experience with and made a significant contribution to the accrediting commission. Dr. Takahashi received her doctorate in applied linguistics from Columbia University and her second doctorate in translation studies from Monash University in Australia. She has published more than 20 books including scholarly books in English and Japanese on language learning, cross-cultural communication, and lexico-semantics; 15 textbooks for Japanese learners of English, eight of which have been translated into Chinese and Korean; and Japanese translations of Rosa Parks: My Story, Quiet Strength, and Dear Mrs. Parks. Takahashi’s memoir entitled Samurai and Cotton, published in November 2011, was named the winner in the autobiography category of the 2012 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

John (aka Jay) completed his doctorate in American history at the University of Rochester, working under the late cultural and intellectual historian Christopher Lasch. Prior to joining Soka University of America in 1996, Jay was a professor in the department of educational foundations in the College of Education, University of Hawaii at Manoa. From the university’s opening in 2001 he served as a member of the humanities concentration and from 2005 through 2016 as dean of students. He also served as associate director of the Pacific Basin Research Center from 1997 until 2014, in which capacity he edited and co-authored four books. In 2019 he was awarded with the BELMAS Management in Education 2018 Best Paper of the Year. Also in 2019, Jay published his most recent book, single-authored, The Rise of the South in American Thought and Education: The Rockefeller Years (1902-1917) and Beyond. His research is situated at the intersection of cultural and intellectual history, social and economic development, and the transnational sources of schooling.

Rosemary Papa was a professor of educational leadership at Northern Arizona University, where she held The Del and Jewell Lewis Endowed Chair in Learning Centered Leadership. While at NAU, she co-founded Educational Leaders Without Borders, the mission of which is “the establishment of a global network of educational scholars who have chosen to work on behalf of all children going to school. Our main objective is all children have a right to go to school.” In 2015 she received the Willystine Goodsell Award from the AERA SIG for Research on Women for her work on a wide range of leadership issues affecting women, children, and social justice. Dr. Papa is not only an accomplished scholar, but also has travelled the world extensively as a consultant to schools and universities in China, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Cypress, Greece, Italy, Portugal, England, Scotland, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and Turkey. Her most recent books include the forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of Administrational Administration (2020) and Springer Handbook on Promoting Social Justice in Education (2020), which is international in scope; International Perspectives on School Violence (Springer 2019), Finding Her in History: Confronting the Traditions of Misogyny (Springer 2017), an international study of gendered poverty and the role education plays; Building for a Sustainable Future in Our Schools: Brick by Brick (Springer 2017), an international perspective on the critical role of educators in sustainable development and the relationship between humans and our earth; and Social Justice Instruction: Empowerment on the Chalkboard (2016), which offers an international palette of strategies for teaching social justice concepts preschool to college. At the 2019 conference of the Comparative and International Education Society, she was honored with Teaching Comparative Education SIG Runner-up for innovative curriculum development for the international and comparative education class.

Karen Moran Jackson’s work centers on the intersection between adolescence development, multicultural research methodologies, and policy analysis. She conducts research in two main areas: the role of research methodology in social and policy change and the development of adolescent attitudes and interests in spaces that have traditionally marginalized adolescents of color. She came to Soka University after working as a research associate at the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in quantitative analysis and research methods. Dr. Jackson graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a PhD from the department of educational psychology and a portfolio in applied statistical modeling from the department of statistics and data science. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a middle school science teacher in California and Texas.