Contact:
Steve Bradt
617.496.8070
David Howell Named Professor of Japanese History at Harvard
Cambridge, Mass. - May 6, 2010 - Historian David L. Howell, whose research has reframed pre-1868 Japan using perspectives from the nation's geographic and social peripheries, has been named professor of Japanese history at Harvard University, effective July 1, 2010.
Howell comes to Harvard's Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Princeton University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1993. He is currently Nissan Professor in Japanese Studies and chair of Princeton's Department of East Asian Studies.
"Professor Howell is one of the most imaginative historians of his generation, and one who excels in rethinking fundamental questions," says Diana Sorensen, dean of arts and humanities in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "As a teacher and mentor in the field of early modern Japanese studies, he has no peer. At Princeton his classes on centuries-old Japanese documents are legendary, and his former students include several eminent historians. His presence will reinvigorate the study of Japanese history at Harvard."
Howell's first book, "Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State" (University of California Press, 1995), examined herring fisheries in Japan's northernmost prefecture, Hokkaido, as a window on the nation's transition to capitalism. Illuminating the dynamic links between the Tokugawa and Meiji eras of Japanese history, this volume vigorously challenged historians' traditional preoccupation with the urban centers of Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto, demonstrating the horizons opened up through scrutiny of peripheral regions on the remotest edge of Tokugawa control.
Howell extended this theme in his second monograph, "Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan" (University of California Press, 2005), which drew attention to people on the literal and figurative boundaries of early modern nations. In this book, Howell sketches the connections between the social status and historical fate of the Ainu, native inhabitants of Hokkaido. He also examines the fate of socially peripheral groups in this geographically and politically peripheral region, demonstrating how scrutiny of history's overlooked edges can afford fresh insights into central questions, such as the entwining of political order and social hierarchy.
Howell's more recent research concerns Japanese elites' intense anxiety about social disorder and foreign invasion in the waning years of Tokugawa rule, which ended in 1868. Through systematic study of disorder in the countryside around Edo, he aims to clarify the roots of this fear as it developed from 1800 through the 1870s. This work promises not only to illuminate government policies as the Japanese shogunate was coming to an end, but also to explain why Meiji leaders after 1868 sought to radically recast centuries-old social and political systems, and why the populace readily accepted these changes.
Howell holds a B.A. in history from the University of Hawai'i at Hilo, awarded in 1981, and an M.A. (1986) and Ph.D. (1989) in history, both from Princeton. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1989 to 1992, after which he was named an assistant professor at Princeton. He became associate professor in 1999 and professor in 2004.
Among other awards, Howell received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 2007 and the Distinguished Alumni Award of the University of Hawai'i at Hilo in 2004.
###