History

Robert Hellyer

The Civil Wars of Japan’s Meiji Restoration and National Reconciliation Global Historical Perspectives

Awarded $5,000 for the period 12/11/14 to 2/28/15

Source: Japan Foundation

Wake Forest University will hold a two-day conference to explore the civil wars that surrounded the Meiji Restoration of 1868: the Boshin War and the Satsuma Rebellion. The conference will examine, first, how the conflicts shaped late nineteenth-century Japan, focusing on interactions with the outside world. Second, it will consider how reconciliation was achieved after each conflict, as compared to the US Civil War, the Taiping Rebellion in China, and other internal conflicts in the same period. Finally, panelists and discussants will examine how the conflicts are understood within historical memories of the period, again drawing comparisons with the United States, China, and Korea. The Wake Forest gathering will be the first of three international conferences on the Meiji Restoration in advance of the sesquicentennial in 2018.

Fellowship

Awarded $2,960

Source: Northeast Asia Council (NEAC) of the Association for Asian Studies with the support of the Japan-US Friendship Commission (JUSFC)

The project explores the economic and social ramifications of Japan’s development of green tea as an export commodity to the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Funding will support archival research into a newly discovered source at the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Diplomatic Record Office in Tokyo.

Green Tea and the Path to an Industrial, International Japan

Awarded 2 fellowships for the period 6/1/07 to 8/30/08 and 9/1/07 to 5/31/08

Sources: Smithsonian Institution and the Japan Foundation

Dr. Helyer has won a Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellowship for the summer and a Japan Foundation grant from the Japanese government for a year in Tokyo to develop a book manuscript and a museum exhibit. Before going to Japan, he will conduct ten weeks of research at the Freer & Sackler Galleries and the National Museum of American History, parts of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. The knowledge gleaned through art, photographs, and advertisements will be used to create a public exhibit on American consumption of Japanese tea, and he has already made plans to partner with an experienced curator. In Tokyo, he will continue his exploration of Japanese green tea export to the United States for a book on the subject.

Jeffrey Lerner

Margo Tytus Visiting Fellowship

University of Cincinnati Department of Classics, 3 January to 31 March 2006

Monique O’Connell

Venice’s Maritime Empire: Conflict and Negotiation in the Renaissance

Year-long residential fellowship in Florence, Italy

Source: Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies

Empire in the Balance: The Venetian Maritime State in the Early Modern Mediterranean

National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend, 2005