KU News Release

East Asian history scholar to speak at KU on Japanese postwar nationalism

LAWRENCE — Well-known researcher and Japan scholar Harry Harootunian will give the Grant Goodman Distinguished Lecture in Japanese Studies at 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 23, at the Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. The event is free and open to the public.

Harootunian’s lecture, titled “The Good Japanese: Disciplining Democracy,” will focus on how Japan sought to divert the effects of creating the image of a new democratic subject by implementing a program that would bind citizens closer to the nation after World War II. This new nationalism aimed to reshape the citizen to resemble the imperial subject of prewar Japan.

Harootunian is a professor emeritus of the University of Chicago and currently is professor of history and East Asian studies at New York University. He also taught at the University of Rochester and was dean of humanities at the University of California-Santa Cruz. He earned his master’s in Far Eastern studies and his doctorate in history from the University of Michigan.

Former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Asian Studies, Harootunian is currently a co-editor of Critical Inquiry and a member of the editorial board of Hihyo Kukan, an intellectual and opinion journal published in Tokyo. His most current publication is “Japan After Japan with Tomiko Yoda” (Duke University Press, 2006) and volume one of the Japanese translation of his “Overcome by Modernity” (Iwanami Shoten, 2007). His most recent project is a book titled “Borrowed Time: History’s Temporalities and the Prospect for Comparison” (forthcoming).

The Goodman lecture is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies. Goodman is professor emeritus of history at KU, specializing in Japanese history and in Japan’s cultural relations with South and Southeast Asia. A lifelong advocate for Asian studies at KU and across the nation, Goodman directed KU’s Center for East Asian Studies during its formative years. He has written, edited or co-edited 15 books and more than 60 articles. He has been a visiting professor at universities throughout Asia and Europe.

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