RIJS People
Faculty
Mikael S. Adolphson
adolphs@fas.harvard.edu
Associate Professor of Japanese History
Dept. of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~ealc
Brought up in Kalmar, Sweden, where he used a thirteenth century castle as his playground, Professor Mikael Adolphson has been a historian as long as he can remember. After graduating from high school in the late (and joyful) 1970s, he went to Lund's University, where he graduated with a B.A. in History in 1984. A premodernist, he was inspired by the similarities between medieval Europe and Japan to focus his attention on pre-1600 Japan. He spent two years studying Japanese at Stockholm University before receiving a scholarship from the Japanese Education Ministry in 1986. During the next two and a half years he lived in Kyoto and Osaka while studying at Kyoto University under the guidance of Professor Oyama Kyohei. In 1989, he entered Stanford University's Ph.D. program with Professor Jeffrey P. Mass as his mentor. Returning to Kyoto University in the spring of 1992 for dissertation research, he also worked for the Japan Volleyball Association as an interpreter. He resumed at Stanford in the fall of 1993 and finished his dissertation two years later. Before coming to Harvard in the fall of 1999, Professor Adolphson taught Japanese and East Asian History at the University of Oklahoma for four years. His publications include "Enryakuji: an Old Power in a New Era," in The Origins of Japan's Medieval World: Courtiers, Clerics, Warriors and Peasants in the Fourteenth Century (1997) and The Gates of Power: Monks, Courtiers and Warriors in Premodern Japan (2000). At present, Professor Adolphson is working on concluding two projects, which will be published in the near future. He is the co-editor, together with Professor Edward Kamens of Yale University and Stacie Matsumoto, a graduate student at EALC, of Centers and Peripheries in Heian Japan, a multi-author volume based on a conference at Harvard in June 2002. Another forthcoming study, entitled The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha: Sôhei and Monastic Warriors in Japan, will shed light on the forces of Japan’s powerful temples and the myths and imagery surrounding the phenomenon known as sôhei (“monk-warriors”).
