Professor Sho Konishi
Associate Professor in Modern Japanese History
St Antony's College
(0)1865 274572
I am a cultural, intellectual, and transnational historian. My current research interests include historical epistemology, aesthetics, humanitarianism, the transnational history of emotions, the history of anarchist natural science (geography, embryology and entomology in particular) and anarchist ethnography, and the transnational intellectual history of non-imperial encounters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have a particular interest in the place of language (including nonverbal language) and translation in the history of human knowledge production. I would be happy to supervise Master's and Doctoral students of modern Japanese history as well as students of any geographical specialization working in related fields. My publications in these areas include Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA 2013); "The Emergence of an International Humanitarian Organization in Japan: The Tokugawa Origins of the Japanese Red Cross," The American Historical Review (October 2014), and "Translingual World Order: Language Without Culture in Post-Russo-Japanese War Japan," Journal of Asian Studies (Feb. 2013).
See page on School on Interdisciplinary Area Studies website
I have recently completed an article on symbiotic nature and survival politics and another on the emergence of the Red Cross and humanitarianism in Japan. My book on anarchist modernity turns our conceptions of modern history of Japan upside down from non-state transnational perspectives. I am also currently working on the history of religion and virtue, a transnational intellectual history of revolutionary losers. My other publications have covered a broad range of themes, such as linguistic democracy, microbiology, entomology, anarchism, agrarian and ecological thought, and art. They are on the whole a cohesive attempt to challenge some of the most established conceptual contours in the historiography of modern Japan. They offer new concepts, theory, and methods for doing modern intellectual and transnational history of Japan.
FORTHCOMING: "Provincializing the State: Nature and Survival Politics in Post‐World War Zero Japan" In New Worlds from Below, edited by Tessa Morris Suzuki. Australian National University, 2017.
Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 2013)
Mid-nineteenth century Russian radicals who witnessed the Meiji Restoration saw it as the most sweeping revolution in recent history and the impetus for future global progress. Acting outside imperial encounters, they initiated underground transnational networks with Japan. Prominent intellectuals and cultural figures, from Peter Kropotkin and Lev Tolstoy to Saigo Takamori and Tokutomi Roka, pursued these unofficial relationships through correspondence, travel, and networking, despite diplomatic and military conflicts between their respective nations. Tracing these non-state networks, Anarchist Modernity uncovers a major current in Japanese intellectual and cultural life between 1860 and 1930 that might be described as "cooperatist anarchist modernity"--a commitment to realizing a modern society through mutual aid and voluntary activity, without the intervention of state governance. These efforts later crystallized into such movements as the Nonwar Movement, Esperantism, and the popularization of the natural sciences. Examining cooperatist anarchism as an intellectual foundation of modern Japan, Sho Konishi offers a new approach to Japanese history that fundamentally challenges the "logic" of Western modernity. It looks beyond this foundational construct of modern history writing to understand people, practices, and cultural expressions that have been forgotten or dismissed as products of anti-modern nativist counter urges against the West.
