Events

MODERATOR

Prof Ian Jared Miller, Harvard University, USA

PROGRAM

 
ABSTRACT

Asia’s oceans demand our attention. Violent and fecund, they define life in the region: pushing the shore under the rush of tsunami; charging typhoon circulation and seasonal monsoons; feeding billions. And yet, Asian Studies remains largely beholden to a terrestrial view of the world that is at odds with the importance of the sea across all eras of the region’s history. This “terrestrial bias” also means that oceans are seen as dividers or connectors, while the interaction with the wet environment often remains obscure. Our “Oceanic Asia” roundtable convenes a multi-national and multi-disciplinary group to expand the scope of Asian Studies and, in particular, global Japan’s place within it. We do this by drawing from the broader turn to the sea—the “new thalassology”—that is developing within our fields and in adjacent areas such as Pacific History, Indian Ocean Studies, and environmental history.

Oceanic and global perspectives are opening up new spaces that were often left untouched by area studies and maritime history. Approaching the nation-state from an oceanic “outside in” perspective also provides new insights into historical agency. Taking “ocean time” instead of terrestrial time into account will bridge modern and pre-modern interactions with the sea above and below its surface. Doing so also draws our attention to environmental, territorial, and social practices and changes. We will investigate especially those that emerged from or took place in the greater Pacific region, driven by our shared interest in integrating Asia and Japan more strongly into global and transnational oceanic history. This interest will lead us far beyond Asia’s coastlines. But it will also help us to shed light on coastal regions otherwise marginalized in “terrestrial” or port-oriented global histories.

Seeing the ocean as more than merely empty space between entrepots or political entities thus elicits questions: How does thinking with and about and against the sea require us to change our practice as humanists and social scientists? Does an oceanic perspective change how we understand the trans- of “trans-national”, “trans-regional”, or other scalar frames? What interests are unsettled by an oceanic approach, especially within the ambit of Asian Studies?

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

David L. Howell is Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of Japanese History and Professor of History at Harvard University. He is Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Editor of Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. He received his BA from the University of Hawai’i at Hilo and PhD in History from Princeton University. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin and Princeton before joining the Harvard faculty in 2010. Howell is the author of Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery (1995) and Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (2005) as well as numerous articles. Howell’s research focuses on the social history of Japan in the Tokugawa (1603-1868) and Meiji (1868-1912) periods. He is particularly interested in the ways changing political and economic institutions affected the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people over the course of the nineteenth century. His current projects include a short survey of the Meiji Restoration period and a history of human waste and garbage in the cities of Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. He is also a co-editor of a new edition of Cambridge History of Japan, which is scheduled for publication in three volumes in 2021.

Ian Jared Miller is a historian of Japan and East Asia. His research is primarily concerned with the cultural dimensions of scientific, technological, and environmental change. He earned his PhD in History from Columbia University in 2005, arriving at Harvard in 2007. He has been a postdoctoral fellow in the Expanding East Asian Studies Program (ExEAS) at Columbia’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University. His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Global Research, the Japan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the United States Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays), and the Social Science Research Council. Miller is the author of The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (University of California Press, 2013) and co-editor with Brett L. Walker and Julia Adeney Thomas of Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power (University of Hawaii Press, 2013). He is currently writing a book about energy and electricity in the making of modern Tokyo, Tokyo Electric: Japan in the Age of Global Energy. Based on archival work in the previously closed archives of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), owner of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, this project redefines the history of the world’s largest city—Tokyo—as a history of energy. Other research and teaching interests include transnational approaches to environmental history, the global history of natural disasters (especially tsunami), urban ecologies, comparative imperialisms, philosophies of action and agency, digital humanities, and the interdisciplinary study of embodiment, disease, and especially public health.

Manako Ogawa is Professor at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. She obtained her PhD from the University of Hawai‘i with her dissertation, “American Women’s Destiny, Asian Women’s Dignity: Trans-Pacific Activism of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1886-1945”. While publishing articles on topics related to women’s international peace and reform movements in Journal of World History, Diplomatic History, and various other academic journals in both English and Japanese, she has gradually shifted her academic concerns to the sea and fishing communities, and published books and articles, including Sea of Opportunity: The Japanese Pioneers of the Fishing Industry in Hawai‘I (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015), and Umi no Tami no Hawai: Hawai no Suisangyo wo Kaitaku shita Nihonjin no Shakaishi (Jimbun Shoin, 2017).

Nadin Heé is Professor for Global History in the History Department of Osaka University. She has a background in empire studies and a focus on East Asia, and her critical engagement with postcolonial theory and theories of violence and trans-imperial aspects of colonial history has been published as Imperiales Wissen und koloniale Gewalt. Japans Herrschaft in Taiwan 1895-1945, (Campus Verlag, 2012), which was awarded the JaDe-Prize. Currently she is interested in global exploration and exploitation of marine resources, particularly from a history of knowledge and environmental historical perspective. She is working on a second monograph that deals with the question how tuna became a global commons.

Stefan Huebner (Hübner) is Senior Research Fellow in the Inter-Asia Engagements Cluster at Asia Research Institute in National University of Singapore, and a historian whose work centers on modern Japan and its connections to other parts of Asia and the world. He is particularly interested in combining questions, methods, and ideas from environmental history, the history of development, international history, and the digital humanities. He was U.S. SSRC Transregional Research Fellow at Harvard University, Fulbright scholar also at Harvard, History and Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and postdoctoral/doctoral fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington, DC and the German Institute for Japanese Studies Tokyo. Currently, he is Co-PI of the Singapore SSRC project on “Linking the Digital Humanities to Biodiversity History in Singapore and Southeast Asia”. He received his PhD from Jacobs University Bremen (Germany) in 2015. His current research project is a global history of the colonization, industrialization, and urbanization of the ocean since the early 20th century.

Sujit Sivasundaram is Professor of World History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow in History at Gonville and Caius College. He is also Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge and until recently, he was Editor of The Historical Journal. His research spans the histories of oceans, culture, science, race, the environment and empires. He is the author of Waves across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (2021); Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (2013) and Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795-1850 (2005). In 2012, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for History. He has held the Sackler Caird Fellowship of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich and visiting fellowships in Sydney, Paris and Singapore. He is Syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum and a member of the Vice Chancellor’s Advisory Committee of Cambridge University’s inquiry into the legacies of enslavement.

Takehiro Watanabe is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. His research focuses on the anthropology of economic cultures, ranging from mining communities to river resource management.

ARI20 ANNIVERSARY ROUNDTABLE SERIES

The ARI20 Anniversary Roundtable Series marks the founding of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore in 2001. The series celebrates our current scholarship while exploring how these themes and topics continue to inspire new trajectories of research. The ARI20 Anniversary Roundtable Series concludes with the convening of a final roundtable featuring the Institute’s current research cluster leaders, who will discuss ARI’s role in charting future humanities and social science research on Asia. While the virtual roundtable format arises from pandemic-related necessity, it will enable ARI alumni and partners around the world to join the discussion on the Institute’s research directions and prospects.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.