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Luke Roberts

Current Courses

Fall 2009 (current)


Winter 2010 (tentative)


Spring 2010 (tentative)


Department Fields

Announcements

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Japanese History


Associate Professor
Ph.D., Princeton University, 1991

Office: HSSB 4228 Hours:
Fax: (805) 893-8795
Email: lukerobt@history.ucsb.edu

I teach history of the Japanese islands from ancient to modern times. I enjoy teaching and use many visual and literary documents to help integrate social and cultural history with the economic and political. I like to get students to think creatively about doing history. My research mostly focuses on the period between the 1500's and the early 1900's, and my graduate teaching focuses on history during this period.

Research and Teaching Interests

  • Early Modern Japanese Social and Economic History

Current Projects

  • Performing the Great Peace: Politics Under Tokugawa Rule
    My current book project explores the influence of nationalism on how we narrate the Tokugawa past, and uses Tokugawa era political language as a starting point to interpret its politics.
  • A Samurai's Life
    Another book project that will likely be my third. A biography of an 18th C. samurai.

Selected Publications

  • Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in Eighteenth Century Tosa, Cambridge University Press, 1998
  • with Sharon Takeda, Japanese Fisherman's Coats From Awaji Island, (UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 2001).
  • "Cultivating Non-national Understandings in Local History," in Joshua Fogel ed. The Teleology of the Modern Nation State: Japan and China
    (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), pp. 161-173.
  • "Mori Yoshiki: Samurai Government Officer," pp. 25-42 in Anne Walthall ed. The Human Tradition in Modern Japan
    (Scholarly Resources, 2001).
  • "A Petition for a Popularly Chosen Council of Government in Tosa in 1787," in The Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (December, 1997), pp. 575-596
  • "A Transgressive Life: The Diary of a Genroku Samurai," in Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 5, no. 2 (December, 1995), pp. 25-30
  • "The Petition Box in Eighteenth Century Tosa" in Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 20, no. 2 (Summer 1994), pp. 423-458
  • 土佐と維新__「国家」の喪失と「地方」の誕生」、『年報近代日本研究』no. ２０
    （１９９７年）、２１１−２３５頁。
  • 「土佐藩訴状箱の制度と機能」、深谷克己・堀新編『展望日本歴史１３、近世国家』
    東京堂出版２０００年、１５８−１７５頁。
  • 「国益思想を作った商人——十八世紀土佐の研究」、脇田晴子、マーチン・コルカット、平雅行編
    『周縁文化と身分制』思文閣出版２００５年、１３６−１６２頁。

Honors and Professional Activities

  • 2007Foreign Research Scholar Fellowship, National Museum of Japanese History, Sakura Japan, for participation in cooperative research project
    “Kinsei seiji ni okeru ôyake to watakushi”
  • 2004-05American Philosophical Society Sabbatical Research Fellowship, for “Denationalizing the Past in Pre-modern Japan”
  • 1994-95Japan Foundation Research Fellowship (Aug. 1994-Aug. 1995) for project, "Samurai Identity in Diaries of Late Eighteenth Century Tosa"
  • 1988-89Japan Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship

Personal Web Site

  • East Asian Cash Coins
    a set of pages devoted to pre-modern copper coinage of East Asia with coins and documents