General announcement aside, this looks like an *amazing* conference (although as a medievalist and a future PhD student at Michigan, I’m a little biased…). Be sure to save the date!

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Location: Michigan League, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Dates: October 6-9, 2011

In the early seventeenth century, Japan entered a period of prolonged, relative stability under the dominion of the Tokugawa shoguns and other regional lords. This sustained period of peace, usually known by scholars as “early modern,” lasted until the mid-nineteenth century, and witnessed revolutions in printing, literacy, consumer culture, and scholarship in countless fields. The artifacts of this whirlwind of production were particularly shaped by their creators’ need to legitimize their present by reviving and revising motifs from earlier eras. Creators drew heavily from the period known to scholars as “medieval Japan” (c.1200-1600). Writers and artists across early modern Japan appropriated medieval terminology and reinterpreted the words and images to fit their own political, artistic, or social-economic agendas. These projects reconstructed the history of medieval men and women of all walks of life—from samurai to outcastes, from pirates to merchants, and from warrior monks to tea masters.

The chronological division between medieval and early modern times in traditional periodization reflects the actual transition of the country from war to peace. But the division between periods has also had the effect of impeding connections in pedagogy, research, and publication across the chronological boundary.  Scholars today on either side of the medieval-early modern divide share only rarely their sources or interpretations with each other.  Japanese academic institutions maintain a discrete section for each of the two periods.  As a result, relationships between the materials produced in each period have often been overlooked. Potentially more dangerous than the shape these particular chronological fields have taken is the impact this split has had on how modernity is understood.  Modern Japan unwittingly and uncritically claims itself to be the heir of an early modern that in fact projected imaginary histories onto its past in order to fit early modern agendas.

This conference features keynote presentations by Professor Kurushima Noriko of the Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo, and Professor Umezawa Fumiko of Keisen University; and panel presentations by Professors Kevin Carr, Thomas Conlan, David Eason, Suzanne Gay, Thomas Keirstead, Morten Oxenbøll, MorganPitelka, Eric Rath, Peter Shapinsky, David Spafford, Hitomi Tonomura, Melanie Trede, and Reinhard Zöllner. In addition, each speaker will offer a short presentation of the primary source that was used to formulate her/his argument.

The conference is open to the public. More details to come soon. Save the date!