Miriam Silverberg

Professor

Field of interest: Modern Japanese Thought, Culture, Social Transformation; Social and Cultural Theory; Comparative Historiography

Education: Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1984

My goal in my work is to ask new questions and to encourage students and my readers to do the same. At a time when disciplinary boundaries and established traditions in area studies are being questioned, we have an opportunity to reflect on why and how we should look at the past, in dialogue with scholars in Japan.

Graduate Seminars:
History, Ethnography, Testimony
The Other Within
Sexuality and Gender
Japanese Ideology of Empire
Race and Culture
Japanese Modernity
Historical Methods
Intimacy in Post-War Japan

As someone who ended up in Japan not by choice but by fate, I attempt to make use of my own history and heritage to teach and to write with nuance. As a scholar whose ideals were forged during the 1960s I have not relinquished the relevance of the term "relevance".

Undergraduate Courses:

	Exotic Japan
	Women in 20th-Century Japan
	Introduction to Historical Practice: Japanese Women in Love and Revolution
	Modern Japan: A History of Empire

Japanese History: Modern, 1868 to the Present

	Love and Citizenship (East and West)
	Japanese Feminism/Feminism in Japan

Such attitudes resulted in my first book, which looked at the leading twentieth century cultural critic, Nakano Shigeharu, in the context of twentieth century Marxist thought and a pre-war Japanese culture of commodification.
My essay on "The Modern Girl as Militant" was the opening chapter in my research on inter-war Japanese mass culture. In Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: Japanese Mass Culture in the 20s and 30s I explore what I term the modern montage of the 1920s and 1930s in order to reformulate our presumptions about popular Japanese attitudes to the West, to the past, toward humor, and to power. Recently, I have been writing about the relationship between contemporary mass culture in Japan and political issues:

TRANSNATIONAL WIVES’ TALES: Yonsama as Postcolonial Ghost and the Revenge of the Obatarians (letter from Los Angeles)

War Responsibility Revisited: Auschwitz in Japan

Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Awarded John King Fairbank Award, 1990. Japanese language version forthcoming, Heibonsha Publishers, Tokyo, Japan.

"Marxism Addresses the Modern: Nakano Shigeharu's Reproduction of Taisho Culture." In J. Thomas Rimer, Ed. Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 133-153.

"The Modern Girl As Militant ." In Gail Bernstein, Ed. Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991.

"Constructing a New Cultural History of Modern Japan" Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture, Duke University Press. Special Issue on "Japan in the World." Vol. 18 No. 3. Fall 1991:61-89; in Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian, Ed., Japan in the World. Duke: Duke University Press, 1993.

"Constructing the Japanese Ethnography of Modernity." Journal of Asian Studies. 51 No.1 (February 1992):30-54.

"Osmanthus" (Translation of short story by Ozaki Midori). Manoa, vol. 3, No.2, Fall 1991: 187-19O. [broadcast over KCRW as part of Japanese short story series Summer 1994

"Remembering Pearl Harbor, Forgetting Charlie Chaplin, and the Case of the Disappearing Western Woman." Solicited for first issue of Positions (new journal of East Asian history and culture). Positions: First issue, special issue on "Colonial Modernity" Vol. 1 No. 1, Spring 1993, pp. 24- 76.

"Nihon no Jokyu wa Buruusu wo Utatta," (The Japanese Cafe Waitress Sang the Blues" in Wakita Haruko, ed. Gendaa no Nihonshi [A Japanese History of Gender] (Tokyo University Press: 1995).

"Advertising Every Body: Images from the Japanese Modern Years" in Susan Foster, Ed. Choreographing History (Indiana University Press, 1995).

"The Inventions of the Modern Cafe Waitress," in Stephen Vlaston, Ed. Mirror of Modernity:The Japanese Invention of Tradition University of California Press).

"Onna Seiyo jin" in Mitsuta Ikuo, Ed. Nakano Shigeharu.

TRANSNATIONAL WIVES’ TALES: Yonsama as Postcolonial Ghost and the Revenge of the Obatarians (letter from Los Angeles).

War Responsibility Revisited: Auschwitz in Japan.

"And Some Not So Bad," in Jan Bardsley and Laura Miller, eds. Bad Girls of Japan. (Palgrave Press, 2005).

Forthcoming publications:

Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: Japanese Mass Culture in the '20s and '30s (University of California Press).
A cultural and intellectual history of Japan during the "modern years," focusing the draw of the West, gender in flux, and popular satire.

After the Grand Tour: Modern Girls, New Women, and Colonial Maidens in the Modern Girl Collective, ed. Modern Girls Around the World. (Duke University Press).

Japanese Women in Revolution: A Century of History. An intellectual-biographical history of five Japanese activist women (from feminist anarchist to cartoon heroine) spanning the early twentieth century into the present.

Intimacy Across Gender and Culture, East and West, a Reader. Co-edited with Madonna Hettinger.

Essays on Japan at War.

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