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Regular Faculty

Alan S Christy
  • Pronouns he, him, his, his, himself
  • Title
    • Cowell Provost
    • Professor
    • History Department Undergraduate Program Director
  • Division Humanities Division
  • Department
    • History Department
  • Affiliations East Asian Studies, Cowell College
  • Phone
    831-459-5031 (office)
  • Email
  • Website
  • Office Location
    • Cowell College Academic Building, Cowell 121
    • Humanities 1, room 535
  • Office Hours Tuesdays 11am to 12:30pm by appointments. Sign up here: https://calendar.app.google/guKyHQnDxNnMqnBt5
  • Mail Stop Cowell College
  • Mailing Address
    • 1156 High Street
    • Santa Cruz CA 95064
  • Faculty Areas of Expertise Asian Studies, Digital Humanities
  • Courses HIS 40A, Early Modern East Asia; HIS 80Y, World War II Memories in the U.S. and Japan; HIS 150B, Tokugawa Japan; HIS 150C, Modern Japan; HIS 150D, The Japanese Empire; HIS 194Y, Memories of WWII in the U.S. and Japan; HIS 194X, History of Okinawa; HIS 243A, Modern Japanese Historiography; HIS 243B, Gender and Modern Japan; HIS 243C, Transnational Japan

Research Interests

Early modern Japan, modern Japan; history of social sciences, colonialism, and nationalism

Biography, Education and Training

Ph.D. University of Chicago

Selected Publications

  • A Discipline on Foot: Inventing Japanese Native Ethnology, 1910-1945, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2012
  • Rethinking Japanese History, Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2012
  • "Primitive Communists and Profiteering Women: Propriety and Scandal in Okinawan Studies." Orientalism: From Postcolonial Theory to World History, E. Burke and D. Prochaska, eds. University of Nebraska Press (2006).
  • "Colonialism and the Sciences of the Tropical Zone: The Academic Analysis of Difference in 'the Island Peoples,' by Tomiyama Ichiro (translation)." Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 3:2 (1995). Reissued in Formations of Colonial Modernity in Asia, T. Barlow, ed. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.
  • "A Fantasy of Ancient Japan: The Assimilation of Okinawa in Yanagita Kunio's Kainan Shoki." Select Papers of the East Asia Center: Productions of Culture in Japan, no. 10, R. Adams, ed. Chicago: East Asia Center, University of Chicago, 1995.
  • "The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa." Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 1:3 (1993). Reissued in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, T. Barlow, ed. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.