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Ian Jared Miller is a historian of modern Japan specializing in cultural and environmental history.  His research is primarily concerned with imperialism and the cultural dimensions of scientific, medical, and environmental change. After graduating from Earlham College with a B.A. in History and Japanese Studies, Professor Miller spent two years living in a fishing village on northeastern Japan’s rugged Rikuchu coast before beginning graduate study at the University of Illinois (M.A., East Asian Languages and Cultures). Following an additional year in Japan, this time in the port city of Yokohama, he moved to New York to complete a Ph.D. in History at Columbia University in 2005.

Professor Miller is currently writing a book introducing readers to the
politicized environment of Japan’s first zoological garden, opened in 1882. The first zoo in the world not built under the sway of a Western imperial regime, the Tokyo Imperial Zoological Garden was a microcosm of changing attitudes towards empire and the natural world in modern Japan.  Research for this project was carried out while in residence as a research fellow at Waseda University in Tokyo.

Before coming to Harvard, Professor Miller taught for two years at Arizona State University and spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow in the Expanding East Asian Studies Program at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

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