Mark Ravina
Professor, (A.B., Columbia University, 1983; M.A., Stanford University, 1988; Ph.D., 1991)
My specialty is Japanese history, especially eighteenth and nineteenth-century politics, but my broader methodological interest is in the transnational and international dimension of state-building. I am currently working on a transnational history of the Meiji Restoration. My early work on that topic, based on a paper I delivered a Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study was published as "State-Making in Global Context: Japan in a World of Nation-States." In The Teleology of the Modern Nation-State, edited by Joshua Fogel, 87-104. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
My first book was Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan (Stanford, 1999), also published in Japanese translation as Meikun no satetsu (NTT shuppan 2004).
In 2004 I published a biography of Saigō Takamori entitled The Last Samurai (John Wiley & Sons). Saigō was the inspiration for the character Katsumoto in the Tom Cruise film, also entitled The Last Samurai. I had begun working on the book without any knowledge of the movie, but the Warner Brothers film sparked a surge in general interest on Saigō. I appeared as a "guest expert" on CNN and on two History Channel programs: "History vs. Hollywood" and "The Samurai."
My other recent publications include 近代化・近代性と名君像の再検討；上杉鷹山を中心に” (Modernization, Modernity and a Re-evaluation of the Image of Wise Lords with a Focus on Uesugi Yōzan) Rekishi hyōron, (January 2010) and "The Apocryphal Suicide of Saigō Takamori: Samurai, Seppuku and the Politics of Legend." Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 3 ( 2010).