THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture Series in Japanese Studies
The Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture series was launched in 2007 by the CEAS Committee on Japanese Studies to honor the legacy of Tetsuo Najita, Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and his contribution to the university during his long career.
About Tetsuo Najita
Educated at Grinnell College and Harvard University, Tetsuo Najita joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1969. His many publications on Japan’s early modern and modern intellectual history include Hara Kei and the Politics of Compromise (1967), which was awarded the John King Fairbank Prize in East Asian History, and Visions of Virtue: The Kaitokudô Merchant Academy of Osaka (1987), which won the Yamagata Bantô Prize. Since his retirement in 2002, Tetsuo Najita has continued his work. In 2008, he published a new work in Japanese on the topic of “doing intellectual history,” and in 2009 the University of California Press published his most recent monograph in English, Ordinary Economies in Japan: A Historical Perspective, 1759-1950. This impressive body of scholarship, which combined theoretical rigor with rock-solid research, and which was ordered by the assertion that historians must always engage with the moral and political issues of our time, served as an inspiration to the many undergraduate and graduate students whom he trained.
In addition to this distinguished record of scholarship and teaching, during his thirty-three year tenure at the university, Tetsuo Najita dedicated much energy to building the Japan Studies program, while playing a leading role within the History Department and the Social Science Division. He served as Director of the Center for East Asian Studies from 1974-1980, Master of the Social Science Collegiate Division from 1984-1987 and Chair of the History Department for 1994-1997 and in spring 2001. Please visit the CEAS In Memoriam site to learn more about the legacy of Testuo Najita.
2023-2024
Anne Allison
Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University
Being Dead Otherwise
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2022-2023
Uehashi Nahoko
Novelist
When 'Monogatari' Take Their First Breath: Insights Gleaned from My Writing Process
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2021-2022
Ichiro Tomiyama
Professor of Global Studies, Doshisha University
The Making of Okinawans: "Reversion" as "L'ensemble des efforts"
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2020-2021
Mary Brinton
Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology and Director, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University
How Japan Got It Wrong: Government Policy, Gender, and the Birth Rate
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2018-2019
Miri Yu
Novelist
Myself Within Japan, Myself Within Fukushima
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2017-2018
Naoyuki Umemori
Professor of History of Modern Japanese Political Thought, Waseda University
American in Japan/Japan in America: Towards a Topographical Analysis of Japanese Intellectual History from KOTOKU Shusui (1871-1911) to ETO Jun (1932-1999)
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2016-2017
Eiji Oguma
Professor Policy Management, Keio University
A New Wave Against the Rock: Social Movements in Japan Since the Fukushima Nuclear Meltdown
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2015-2016
Yoko Tawada
Writer
Where Literature Begins: The Practice and Poetics of Multilingual Address
2014-2015
Ryuichi Narita
Professor of History, Japan Women's University
The Various Routes of Post-WWII Japanese Intellectuals: Their Perspectives on the War and World
2013-2014
Jun'ichi Isomae
Associate Professor, International Research Center for Japanese Studies
Haruki Murakami and the Question of Uneven Democracy in Post-Fukushima Japan
2012-2013
Chizuko Ueno
Professor Emeritus, Tokyo University
Forty Years of Japanese Feminism: What It Has Achieved....and What It Has Not
2011-2012
Akio Igarashi
Professor Emeritus of Law and Politics, Rikkyo University
A Structure of Deceit: The Japanese Nuclear Energy Program
2010-2011
Koyasu Nobukuni
Professor Emeritus, Osaka University
Japanese Intellectuals and China
2009-2010
Oe Kenzaburo
Nobel Laureate
A Novelist Re-Reads Kaitokudo
2008-2009
Yuki Tanaka
Research Professor, Hiroshima Peace Institute
Crime and Responsibility: War, Indiscriminate Bombing, and Mass Killing
2007-2008 (Inaugural Lecture)
Tetsuya Takahashi
Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo
Postwar Japan on the Bring: Militarism, Colonialiasm, Yasukuni Shrine