New Directions in the Study of Early Modern Asia (2009-12)

Click here for 2009-10 events

About the Project

In the fall of 2009 PIIRS and the Program in East Asian Studies (EAP) will launch the planning phase of the research cluster “East Asia and the Early Modern World: Fresh Perspectives on Material Culture, Social Formations, and Intellectual History, 1550–1800.” Principal investigators and coordinators of the three-year research cluster are David Howell, chair of the Department of East Asian Studies, and Professors of history Benjamin Elman and Susan Naquin.

This research cluster investigates three new areas on different margins of the present historiography and reexamines the frameworks for understanding East Asia between 1550 and 1800. Using new sources, making new connections, and reexamining old assumptions, the investigators ask whether and why China and Japan should be called “early modern” and explore whether European modernity is an appropriate standard at all for East Asia. Individually and collectively, the researchers seek to establish linkages between societies without making a priori assumptions about the countries’ internal structures or the genealogy of their connections.

As planned, this project explores:

• Teachers, classicists, doctors, classical languages, and textbooks in early modern Japan, Korea, and China  (Benjamin Elman)
• The role and political consequences of culture and status in Japan and Korea (David Howell)
• The role of artisans and artifacts in China before 1800 (Susan Naquin)

This PIIRS-EAP research cluster is also supported by the Comparative History of Philology in Early Modern Asia, a collaborative project between Oxford, Princeton, and Columbia that is funded through the Oxford-Princeton Research Partnership.

For more information contact Jayne Bialkowski, program manager.

Faculty

Benjamin Elman is a professor of East Asian studies and history and director of the Program in East Asian Studies. His courses focus on the social and cultural history of premodern China, the history of education in China; the history of science and medicine in China and Japan, research methods for classical historiography, and Sino-Japanese cultural interactions, 1600–1800. He has published widely in the intellectual history of China and has coauthored the world history textbook, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart. Publications relevant to this PIIRS project include: From Philosophy to Philology: Social and Intellectual Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (2001); A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (2000); On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (2005). Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania.

David Howell '89 is a professor of history and chair of the Department of East Asian Studies. His courses at Princeton include undergraduate surveys of early modern Japanese history, modern East Asian history, the samurai in Japanese history and culture, and graduate seminars on a variety of topics in early-modern and nineteenth-century Japanese history. He is the author of two books, Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery (1995) and Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (2005), and numerous articles. Ph.D. Princeton University.

Susan Naquin is a professor of history and East Asian studies. Her research interests include the social and cultural history of early modern China (1600–1900) and popular religion and material culture of China. She is the author numerous publications including Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (1976), Shantung Rebellion: The Wang Lun Uprising of 1774 (1981), and Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400–1900 (2000). Ph.D. Yale University.

Events

Conference
November 12-14, 2009
East Asia and the Early Modern World: Part 1--Fresh Perspectives on Intellectual and Cultural History 1550-1800

CONFERENCE IS BY INVITATION ONLY AND IS NOT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Click here for the Conference agenda.

Conference Participants
Click on the names for relevant articles.

Susan L. Burns (University of Chicago) is an associate professor of history and East Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago and author of Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (2003). She works in the areas of early modern and modern intellectual history, the history of medicine and the body, and gender and women’s history. She is currently completing a study on the history of psychiatry in Japan and has begun work on a monograph that explores the hybrid medicine of the early nineteenth century by examining the practices of a village doctor.

Allison Busch (Columbia University) is assistant professor of Hindi-Urdu literature at Columbia University. Her research centers on early modern Hindi literature and intellectual history with a special interest in courtly traditions. She has recently completed a book manuscript on the Poetry of Kings, a literary and social history of precolonial Hindi. Her current project is to study the regional histories (in various dialects of Hindi) of the Mughal period.

Kevin Chang (Academia Sinica, Taiwan) is an associate professor/associate research fellow at the the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, in Taiwan. An historian of science and medicine in early modern Europe, Chang's research includes seventeenth- and eighteenth-century life and material sciences, early modern alchemy, history of vitalism, and cultural history of academia. He is particularly interested in early modern matter theory, medical thought, natural philosophy, oral and textual culture, authorship, academic degrees, and the institutions of scientific publication. He has recently been working on subjects of comparative or transcontinental intellectual and cultural history.

Michael Cook (Princeton University), Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies, joined Princeton's faculty in 1986. He is widely considered among the most outstanding Islamicists in America. He has made major contributions to the intellectual history of the medieval Islamic world and his works on Muhammad and early Islamic theology are classics. Cook’s most recent publication is a monograph on the Islamic value al-amr bi`l-ma'ruf [roughly translated as the duty of each and every Muslim to tell people off for violating God's law]; other publications include Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge 2000) and The Koran (Oxford 2000). He teaches graduate courses centered on Arabic texts and undergraduate courses on the early centuries of Islamic history and world history.

Benjamin Elman (Princeton University)

Khaled El-Rouayheb (Harvard University) is an assistant professor of Islamic intellectual history at Harvard University. His current research is on the history of Arabic logic between 1200 and 1800. He is also interested in the intellectual life of this postclassical period of Arabic-Islamic civilization.

Zhaoguang Ge (Fudan University, Shanghai)is dean and professor at Fudan University, Shanghai, China.

Asaf Goldschmidt (University of Tel Aviv) is a senior lecturer at the Department of East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University. His teaches and writes about Chinese medicine, its history, philosophy, and social context. He research focuses on the transformations of Chinese medicine during the Song dynasty, the imperial government's impact on medical knowledge and practice, and the status of physicians during this era. His book, titled The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song Dynasty 960–1200, was recently published by Routledge as part of the Needham Research Institute Series. His most recent research concerns the history of the Imperial Pharmacy as an imperial medical institution with public health bearing and on the history of clinical encounter during the Song-Yuan period.

Michael Gordin (Princeton University)is an associate professor and Jonathan Edwards Bicentennial Preceptor in the Department of History. Gordin’s interests include history of the modern science, especially in Russia and the Soviet Union. He is the author of A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (2004) and Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (2007) and is currently finishing a book on the development of the Soviet atomic bomb, Red Cloud at Dawn (forthcoming). Ph.D. Harvard University.

Constanze Güthenke (Princeton University) is an associate professor of classics at Princeton University. She teaches and writes on ancient and modern Greek literature and culture and on questions of the classical tradition. Her book on modern Greece and the dynamics of romantic Hellenism is forthcoming.

Robert A. Kaster (Princeton University) is a Latinist who has worked on various aspects of Roman cultural and literary history. His projects relevant to the interests of the EAS Research Cluster include his book, "Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity" (Berkeley 1988), on the social structure of Roman education in the fourth and fifth centuries CE; and his current work on the "Saturnalia" of Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius (ca. 430 CE), an encyclopedic dialogue concerned with the transmission of literary culture at a moment of revolutionary change in a deeply traditional society (a 3-volume translation, with introduction and annotation.

Shigehisa Kuriyama (Harvard University) is a professor of cultural history at Harvard University. His research explores broad philosophical issues through the lens of specific topics in comparative cultural history. He is currently working chiefly on two projects. The first is a history of the notion and experience of tension and the second spotlights the relationship between money and the body.

Angela Kiche Leung (Chinese University of Hong Kong) is a professor of history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and research fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica. She has recently published a book on the history of leprosy in China and edited a volume on medicine for women in Imperial China.

David Lurie (Columbia University) is an assistant professor of Japanese history and literature at Columbia University. His book on the development of writing systems in Japan through the Heian period, Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing, is forthcoming. His research interests include the literary and cultural history of premodern Japan; the Japanese reception of Chinese literary, historical, and technical writings; the development of Japanese dictionaries and encyclopedias; and the history of linguistic thought.

Christopher Minkowski (University of Oxford) is the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford. His areas of interest are the Vedic language, literature, and religion; the Sanskrit epic; and early-modern intellectual history and history of science.  His current research focuses on Sanskrit knowledge systems on the eve of colonialism and comparative history of philology in early modern Asia.

Kate Wildman Nakai (Sophia University, Tokyo) is a professor of history at Sophia University in Tokyo. Her research is currently centered on the history of the interpretation of the myths of "the age of the gods" and the intersection between Confucianism and Shinto in Japanese thought, particularly the late-Mito school.

Sheldon Pollock (Columbia University) is the William B. Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Columbia University. His areas of specialization are Sanskrit philology, Indian intellectual and literary history, and comparative intellectual history. His most recent monograph, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, was issued in paperback in 2009. He is current book projects include Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World and Reader on Rasa: A Historical Sourcebook in Indian Aesthetics, the first volume in a new series on classical Indian thought.

Hugh L. Shapiro (University of Nevada, Reno) is an associate professor in the Department of History. His areas of interest are East Asian history, China, and the history of medicine.

Haruo Shirane (Columbia University) is Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University.  He is a specialist in premodern and early modern Japanese literature and has written widely on prose fiction, poetry, literary theory, and cultural history. Shirane’s recent explorations include the issue s of canonization, popularization, and visual culture. He is author and editor of numerous publications including most recently Envisioning the Tale of Genji: Media, Gender, and Cultural Production (2008). Ph.D. Columbia University.

Hirata Shoji (Kyoto University) is a professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Kyoto University, where his research interests include Chinese language and literature, literature of various countries, theories of literature criticism, and linguistics.

Atsuko Ueda (Princeton University) is a professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, where she pecializes in modern Japanese literature and culture. Her research interests include literary historiography of modern Japan; linguistic reforms of Meiji Japan and the production of a "national" language; postwar literary criticism and its relationship to war responsibility; and bilingual and bicultural literature of contemporary Japan. She is currently working on a book, Voices of Language: Linguistic Reform Movements in Meiji Japan, which explores the many proposals for linguistic reforms prevalent in the Meiji period.

Shang Wei (Columbia University) is an associate professor of Chinese literature at Columbia University. He specializes in premodern Chinese culture and literature, especially fiction and drama of late imperial times.  His book, The Unofficial History of the Scholars (Rulin waishi), addresses the issues essential to the eighteenth-century intellectual discourse and literature: the mid-Qing debates over ritual and ritualism, the construction of history, narrative, and lyricism. His current book project is Commercial Publicity: Jin Ping Mei Cihua and late Ming Culture. 

Graduate Students

Yulia Frumer (Princeton University) is a Ph.D. candidate in the history of science program. Her research deals with scientific developments in eighteenth century Japan, focusing on the relation between the material and conceptual aspects of Edo period scientific practice. Her dissertation describes the integration of mechanical clocks into Edo culture and especially their role in the astronomical practice of the late-eighteenth to early-nineteenth centuries.

Regan Murphy (Harvard University). Murphy’s work reevaluates the relationship between Kokugaku and Buddhism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by focusing on three themes: language, history, and ritual.  His dissertation explores the issues raised by Keichu's phonological studies, looking especially at the vigorous debate that these studies stimulated over the status and historicity of the Japanese kana and language; the role of Buddhism in Tominaga Nakamoto's general theory of history; the work of Jiun Sonja; and the ways the new academic methods of the late-eighteenth century brought about a re-fashioned Buddhism, in which ritual found a central place. 

Ori Sela (Princeton University) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian. His research interests include the intellectual history of Late Imperial China, as well as comparative intellectual history, the interactions between different culture— Confucian, Manchu, and Jesuit in particular—and the history of science. His dissertation focuses on the nexus of knowledge, identity, and power in eighteenth century China, and the historiography of that period in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Daniel Trambaiolo (Princeton University) is a Ph.D. candidate in the history of science. His research interests include the development of new medical ideas and practices in China's Song-Jin-Yuan-Ming transition (c. 1100–1400) and the reshaping of Chinese medical traditions in Tokugawa Japan.

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