Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Presentation at the conference "Bridging the Methodological Gap: Devising Collaborative Quantitative and Qualitative Research Projects on Japan," University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, November 2019

Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History - An Introduction

Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (virtual), April 2021

Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History - AHA 2020

Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, New York, January 2020. Session 271, "Mapping the Space of History: Borders and Liminal Space in the Global System.

Placing the Poor in Japan’s Long Nineteenth Century

Poverty offers a useful window onto a society’s organization and values. The poor are not some timeless, universal category of those who “have not.” Rather, they are products of specific geotemporal configurations of economic, social, and political power. Ideologically and practically, the poor are assigned a place in a given sociopolitical order, and understanding how they occupy or transgress that place helps us understand the mechanisms that evolve to sustain a system or that prove inadequate to that task. The two books under review address chronologically adjacent yet substantially different moments in the history of poverty in Japan. Together, they show the evolution of a set of social relations that underpinned the Tokugawa order, and the ways in which a dramatically increased concentration of urban poor people were left largely to fend for themselves in the midst of the social, economic, and political upheavals of the late Meiji years..

Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Presentation at the Sixth European Congress on World and Global History (virtual), June 17, 2021. Theme: “Minorities, Cultures of Integration and Patterns of Exclusion.” Panel: "Digital history and the writing of minority (global) histories.