 Scott
O'Bryan
Assistant Professor, EALC and History
Ph.D. Columbia University, 2000
spobryan@indiana.edu
Goodbody Hall 332
(812) 855-2454
Research Interests
- Twentieth-century Japan
- Economic nationalism
- Consumption and consumer culture
- Environmental history
- Peace thought and practice
Courses Recently Taught
- J400 Revolution and Nationalism in Modern Asia
- E352 War and Peace in Modern Japan
- G369 Modern Japanese History
- E600 Modernism and High Modernism in Mid-twentieth-Century Japan
Awards and Distinctions
- Research Advisory Council Grant, University of Alabama (2003) (declined)
- Leonard Hastings Schoff Publication Award, Columbia University (2001)
- Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia
University (2000-01)
- Fulbright Fellowship (1995-96)
Publication Highlights
- "Economic Knowledge and the Science of National Income in Twentieth-Century
Japan," Japan Studies Review. Vol. 6, Fall 2002.
- "'Shin naru kokka tôkei seido': Nihon shihonshugi no shindan to
teikokugo seichôshugi" ("'A New State System of Statistics': Diagnosing
Japanese Capitalism and the Pursuit of Post-Imperial Growth"), forthcoming
(2004) in volume edited by Nakamura Masanori.
- Translation. Mitsunobu Sugiyama, "The World Conception of Japanese
Social Science: The Kôza Faction, the Ôtsuka School, and the Uno School
of Economics." In Tani E. Barlow, ed., New Asian Marxisms (Duke University
Press, 2002), 205-46.
I consider myself to be a historian of the modern era first and a historian
of Japan second. I am motivated in both my research and teaching by the
desire to work against exceptionalist views of Japanese history, whether
praising or damning, and to place Japanese experience squarely within
the broader transnational history of modernity. I believe that historical
invocations by Japanese of various brands of national exceptionalism should
be seen not so much as evidence of actual deviation from some putatively
normal modern trajectory (usually labeled "western"), but as themselves
part of the very vocabulary of modern modes of expression. My current
research examines the intellectual history of Japanese capitalism in the
twentieth century. I explore the ways changing modes of economic knowledge
shaped conceptions of the modern nation and were mobilized in the service
of cultural ideologies of national power. I am specifically interested
in the legitimation over the last century of the concept of high economic
growth and of mass consumption lifestyles. My work tells a history of
the ideal of never-ending growth and, as such, hopefully contributes in
its own way to the field of environmental history and to attempts to reconceive
economies in terms of sustainable alternatives to growthist paradigms.
I am currently developing courses that help students explore the history
of state violence and war and the alternatives to these offered by activists
from a variety of perspectives. One such class that will include these
topics will be a history of the modern era through the lens of Hiroshima
as both city and event.
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