UCI Department of History: FACULTY

When I worked on collective violence and social conflict in late eighteenth-century Japan, I discovered the vast documentary resources available for the study of peasant life in the early modern period. Thanks to a system of domination that separated the ruling military class from the land, every village had to communicate with the authorities in writing. This spur to literacy resulted not only in public records, but in private family collections which can be mined for rich veins of information on daily activities as well as reflections on the trends of the times. I have already dug out materials on rural kabuki, poetry writing circles, prayers to peasant martyrs, conflict over the sale of nightsoil, the life cycle of peasant women, and the often invisible role of women in social protest. I recently finished working on the biography of a rich peasant woman whose escapades on behalf of the emperor in 1863 brought her enough public recognition that her writings have been preserved and published.

Provisionally titled "Palace Women and Court Life in Early Modern Japan," my current project takes an explicitly cross-cultural approach to the study of women sequestered in the ooku (great interior) who served the shogun in Tokugawa Japan (1600-1867). My goal is to rethink what place women did and the meaning this held for their society by comparing the history, configuration, politics, economics and representations of enclosed spaces across Asia and parts of Africa. Through this approach, I hope to provide a new perspective on political and economic arrangements that both supplements and supplants widely accepted assumptions regarding men's and women's roles, sexuality and bodily disciplines as well as the nature and function of the early modern state.