In April 2021 Hidetaka Hirota's book Expelling the Poor (OUP, 2017) received an honorable mention for the 2020 Peggy O’Brien Book Prize from the Irish Association for American Studies. The award is for the best book in American Studies published in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Hirota will be joining Department of History at UC Berkeley as an associate professor during the Spring 2022 semester.