RIJS People
Postdoctoral Fellows 2009-2010
RAJA ADAL
Ph.D. History, Harvard University 2009
adal@fas.harvard.edu
Dr. Raja Adal spontaneously began to compare different societies while studying in France, Germany, the Arab world, and Japan over the course of his academic career. After completing a B.A. at the Johns Hopkins University he studied for seven years in Japan, completing an M.A. degree in International Relations at the International University of Japan in Niigata, and beginning his doctoral studies at Kyoto University. In 2002 he left Japan to begin work in comparative history at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in 2009.
Dr. Adal’s dissertation, "Nationalizing Aesthetics: Art Education in Japan and Egypt, 1872-1950" examines the birth of art education in modern Japan and Egypt. It traces how drawing and calligraphy education were transformed from instruction in functional skills for rapid, precise, and efficient communication to training in artistic practices. Art was taught in Japanese and Egyptian schools as a way of creating imagined communities through the sensations of shared aesthetic tastes. In teaching drawing and calligraphy as well as music, Japanese and Egyptian educators tried to shape not only the understanding of pupils but their desires. This quest to influence children's hearts inaugurated the global era of aesthetic modernity, when nation building called for controlling the desires of the citizenry.
Dr. Adal will utilize his time at the Reischauer Institute to revise his dissertation for publication and to conduct preliminary research for a new project. He plans to integrate fresh material into his dissertation regarding European penmanship education and key figures in Japanese art education, including little known theorists and teachers whose contributions made them significant historical actors. After publishing this first work, Dr. Adal will begin a new project on the global history of the typewriter.
ACADEMIC YEAR 2009-2010: COURSE BY DR. RAJA ADAL:
History 76d. Asian and African Encounters with Empire
Catalog Number: 94343 Enrollment: Limited to 12.
Half course (fall term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
This course introduces you to Western expansion from the perspective of Asian and African societies. It begins with theoretical approaches to the role of Western expansion in the modernization of Asian and African societies. It then turns to case studies of Western expansion, asking how five Asian and African societies reacted to the threat of Western arms and the attraction of Western goods and sciences.
MICHAEL FISCH
Ph.D. Anthropology, Columbia University 2008
mfisch@fas.harvard.edu
Dr. Michael Fisch conducted his graduate studies at Columbia University, earning his Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2008. His research comprises elements of social anthropology, media studies, communication, and science and technology studies. He is interested in modernity in Japan from the perspective of the evolution of mass mediated society, circa 1900, and the development of mass society theory. His work in these areas forms the theoretical underpinning for his research into new media and new forms of social organization and political representation.
Dr. Fisch has taught in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Sophia University in Tokyo and in the East Asian Studies Department at New York University. He has published on such diverse topics as the fiction of Murakami Haruki, chapel weddings in Japan, and the 2005 Japanese media phenomenon The Train Man.
Dr. Fisch’s dissertation, On the Train: An Anthropology of the Technosocial in Contemporary Japan, examines the commuter train network in Tokyo and Osaka as site and apparatus for the organization of urban life. A central argument of his dissertation is that an emerging relationship between the train and the internet is reshaping the commuting experience and culture surrounding Japan’s commuter train network. He analyzes the organizing schematic of the train network and maps the divergent sets of social relations that are constituted through it. Via the commuter train network, he considers debates on the nature of labor in contemporary Japan, shifts in the conceptualization of the character and constitution of the urban population, and the role of new media. While at the Reischauer Institute, he will revise his dissertation for publication, bringing to the foreground a discussion of the conflict surrounding the privatization of Japan National Railways in the late 1980s.
ACADEMIC YEAR 2009-2010: COURSE BY DR. MICHAEL FISCH:
Anthropolog 1690: The Culture Machine: Youth Culture, Networks and Commodities in East Asia
Catalog Number: 1201
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., 10–11:30. EXAM GROUP: 12, 13
This course will look at the production, dissemination and consumption of commodities in contemporary East Asia. It will question the significance in the present of conventional notions of the commodity, labor theory of value, mass media and mass consumption. Particular attention will be paid to the role of youth in the production and consumption of culture, and to processes of national branding.
DEBORAH BAXT SOLOMON
Ph.D. History, University of Michigan 2009
dsolomon@fas.harvard.edu
Dr. Deborah Solomon received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2009. She studies the Japanese colonization of Korea and focuses specifically on anti-Japanese Korean student activism during the colonial period. Her dissertation, Imperial Lessons: Discourses of Domination and Dissent in the 1929 Kwangju Student Protests, examines the relationship between language, power, and public space in two different public student protest movements that began in colonial Korea, both originating from the southwestern city of Kwangju. Imperial Lessons combines retrospective personal narratives and contemporary documentary sources to analyze how colonial-era Korean student protest was enacted, witnessed, repressed, and remembered by differently-positioned actors. The project historicizes 1929-1930 activism to reveal how Japanese rule created new spatial conceptions on the Korean peninsula both by transforming local public spaces in Korea and by requiring Koreans to imagine themselves as members of a larger Japanese empire. It was within this framework, in turn, that the new subject position of the student protester emerged.
During the 2009-2010 academic year, Dr. Solomon plans to expand her dissertation research to explore further how colonial rule and student resistance evolved in complex and mutually constitutive ways throughout the colonial period. In addition, she will be studying the connections and continuities between colonial-era student unrest and post-colonial social protest on the Korean peninsula. Beginning in Fall 2010, Dr. Solomon will join the Department of History and Political Science at Otterbein College in Ohio as an Assistant Professor of Asian History.
