Mark Ravina

Mark Ravina, Associate Professor, (A.B., Columbia University, 1983; M.A., Stanford University, 1988; Ph.D., 1991) and Director of the East Asian Studies Program. My specialty is Japanese history, especially eighteenth and nineteenth-century politics, but my broader methodological interest is in the transnational/international dimension of state-building. My first book was Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan (Stanford, 1999), recently published in Japanese translation as Meikun no satetsu (NTT shuppan 2004). My articles include "Wasan and the Physics that Wasn't," Monumenta Nipponica 48:2 (Summer 1993) and "State-building and Political Economy in Early Modern Japan," Journal of Asian Studies (November 1995).

I recently published a biography of Saigo Takamori entitled The Last Samurai for John Wiley & Sons (2004). Saigo was the inspiration for the character Katsumoto in the Tom Cruise film, also entitled The Last Samurai. This was pure coincidence, but the Warner Brothers film piqued interest in my book and I appeared as a "guest expert" on CNN and on two History Channel programs: "History vs. Hollywood" and "The Samurai."

On a more scholarly note, I have begun to explore the idea of transnational history, emphasizing interactions between nations and cultures. My first articles along these lines, based on a paper I delivered a Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study is "State-making in Global Context: Japan in a World of Nation-State" in Joshua Fogel, ed., “Japan” and “China”: the Teleology of the Modern Nation-State (U Penn Press, 2004).

Curriculum Vitae