Alexandria Dugal

DPhil Research Topic: ‘Women in an Extraordinary Time’: The Transnational Network and Educational Spaces of the Canadian Eiwa Girls’ Mission Schools in 1920s and 1930s Japan

My DPhil thesis explores the 1920s and 1930s experiences, education, and networking of female Japanese students, alumnae, teachers, and Canadian missionaries of the Japanese Eiwa girls' mission schools of the Women's Missionary Society of the Methodist Church of Canada (from 1925 the United Church of Canada). It illuminates how school actors built a wide transnational network and practiced international education and exchange by reaching out to the wider world through a tense and turbulent period of history. My DPhil research was generously supported, in part, by Mansfield College, the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee, the Sir Richard Stapley Educational Trust, and the Canadian Centennial Scholarship Fund (CCSF), among other funding bodies.

I have been a co-convenor of the Japanese History Workshop at the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies (2019-2020) and a teaching assistant for the Modern Japan History Tutorial (Modern History of Japan in the Wider World, 1868-1972), Faculty of History, University of Oxford (2021).

My current research interests include the transnational networking female Japanese mission school actors engaged in, their involvement with international and intergenerational Christian women's organizations, and the international education they practiced which connected themselves and their schools to the wider world across national boundaries in the 1930s.

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Publications

-  “The Coexistence of Christianity and Japanese Nationalist Sentiment during the Pacific War: Murota Tamotsu of the Shizuoka Eiwa Jogakkō,” Princeton Journal of East Asian Studies, 13 (2018): 83-93.
- “Martha Jane Cunningham: A Women’s Missionary Society Pioneer,” International Bulletin of Mission Research 42.1 (2018): 76-84.

Conference Participation

- ‘International education through the YWCA and the role of Eiwa girls’ school students in 1930s Japan’, The Intellectual Lives of Children One-Day Colloquium: Centre for the History of Childhood, University of Oxford, 2 July 2021

- ‘“Where is peace hiding? Why will it not show itself before us?”: Voices from Christian mission girls' schools in 1930s Japan’, Children's History Society & Manchester Centre for Youth Studies Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University, 16-19 June 2021

- ‘Knowledge Production and Formation Within the Canadian Eiwa Mission Girls’ Schools in 1930s Japan: Transnational Communication, International Mobility, and Christian Women’s Organizational Networking’, The 15th Annual Graduate Conference in European History, University of Vienna, 7-9 April 2021

- 'Girls’ Schools and Global Connections: The YWCA at the Canadian Methodist Eiwa Mission Schools in 1930s Japan', Women's History Network Online Student Conference: Studying Herstories, 8 March 2021

- ‘The YWCA as a global connector in 1930s Japan: A case study of the Canadian Eiwa mission girls’ schools’, The Oxford Transnational and Global History Seminar, University of Oxford, 16 February 2021

 - “‘Messengers of peace’:  Kawai Michi, the Eiwa girls’ schools, and education in 1930s Japan,” Women, Gender and Culture Seminar, University of Oxford, 4 Feb 2019

- “‘To make students internationally minded:’ A discussion of pre-war curriculum at the Tōyō Eiwa Jogakkō,” Japanese Studies Graduate, University of Oxford, 14 Nov 2019

- “Student Reports, Internationalism, and Collective Identity at the Japanese Eiwa Schools,” History of Childhood Seminar, University of Oxford, 12 Jun 2019

- “‘Friends of Other Lands’: Peaceful Transnational Exchange and the Eiwa School Network in Pacific War Japan,” Fifth Berlin International Global History Student, Freie Universität, Berlin, 31 May - 2 Jun 2019

- Panel Chair, Reopening the “Opening of Japan” Conference, University of Oxford, 11 May 2019

- “‘Such Unrighteous War’: Christianity in the Pacific War at the Japanese Shizuoka Eiwa Mission Girls’ School,” The 2019 Interdisciplinary History of War Conference, University of Oxford, 19 Mar 2019

- “Japan’s Gendered Peace and Suffrage Activism at Home and through a Transnational Lens,” Pacific Worlds in Global History: Graduate Perspectives on Approaches, Challenges & Disciplinary Futures Workshop, University of Oxford, 30 Nov 2018

- “Japanese Activist Christian Women and Gendered Ideas of War and Peace in the 1930s,” University of Reading Research in Progress Postgraduate Conference – Histories of Gender, 24 Oct 2018

- “A Duality of Duty: Pacific War Mobilization at the Japanese Eiwa Girls’ Schools,” New Voices in the History of War Seminar, University of Oxford, 8 Jul 2018

- “In an Unlikely Time and Place: Seeking out Hidden Transnational Connections through the Eiwa School Network,” Oxford Sudbury Transnational and Global History Seminar: Graduate Approaches to Global History, University of Oxford, 25 May 2018

- “Murota Tamotsu and the Coexistence of Christianity and Japanese Nationalist Sentiment during the Pacific War at the Shizuoka Eiwa Jogakkō,” International History of East Asia Seminar, University of Oxford, 5 Feb 2018