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 Thomas
Keirstead
Associate Professor, EALC and History
PhD, Stanford University, 1989
tkeirste@indiana.edu
Goodbody Hall 245
(812) 855-5619
Research Interests
- Japanese history and historiography
- Medievalism
- Film and history
Courses Recently Taught
- EALC E350, Studies in East Asian Cultural History (various topics)
- HIST G357/G367, Premodern Japan
Awards and Distinctions
- Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, ACLS,
2000-2002
- Residence year at the National Humanities Center, 2000-2001
- Mellon Foreign Area Fellowship, Library of Congress, January-July
1998
- ACLS Fellowship for Recent Recipients of the Ph.D., January-June
1991
Publication Highlights
- The Geography of Power in Medieval Japan. Princeton University
Press, 1992.
- "Nation and Postnation in Japan: Global Capitalism and the Idea
of National History." In Nation Work: Asian Elites and National
Identities, ed. Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2000.
- "Inventing Medieval Japan: The History and Politics of National
Identity." Medieval History Journal 1, no. 1 (1998): 47-71.
- "Gardens and Estates: Medievality and Space." positions: east
asia cultures critique 1, no. 2 (1993): 289-320.
Websites
My current research is inspired by two questions, the one (more or less)
specific to Japanese history, the other more general. The first question:
"Why does Japan have a middle ages?" The answer, I of course contend,
is not "Well, because it did. There were knights and monks and homage
and fief-like things, because there is an age, lasting from about 1150
to 1600 of political and social disorder (or creativity, depending on
one's perspective) between two periods of stability." In fact, the startling
thing, given the immense popularity the medieval era enjoys today, is
that no indigenous concept supplies Japan with the idea of a middle ages.
We can pinpoint quite clearly the provenance of the idea: the periodization
practices that create it are an imported construct. The familiar tripartite
scheme, in which the middle ages are the pivot, came from European historiography.
Chusei, the Japanese translation for the "medieval," first appeared in
works about European history in the 1870s; Japan did not gain a "middle
ages" until about 1890, and the concept did not really take hold until
the first decades of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, despite its
late arrival, the era has been a resounding success, both in the popular
imagination and as an academic speciality-and this, I should add, sets
Japan apart from the many other places historians have tried to outfit
with a middle ages. In China, for example, the idea still occasions considerable
controversy. But in Japan the middle ages have become a staple. Dramas
set in the middle ages are a regular fixture of japanese film and television.
Medieval warlords like Minamoto Yoritomo, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Oda
Nobunaga are regularly cited are leadership models; Zen, the tea ceremony,
and samurai films may be Japan's most widely recognized cutural exports;
and the man who may be Japan's most popular and influential historian-he
is accorded his own section in many bookstores (with 141 books at last
count, he'd need it), and his books have sold upwards of 100,000 copies-is
a medievalist, Amino Yoshihiko.Second question. I've already mentioned
samurai films and TV. My second question derives from a realization that
we historians, however much we may lament the fact, aren't the only producers
of history. And to concentrate exclusively on the work of certified "historians"
is to lose track of other important influences. So my second, more general
question, concerns the ways history is produced in different ways in different
media. I aim to examine the traffic in ideas about history across generic
boundaries, to chart the ways various forms of history (epic films vs.
monographs, historical novels vs. television documentaries) interact with
and respond to each other. Historical novels, films, and television shows
certainly count among the most prolific suppliers of historical knowledge,
and amateurs are not the only ones taken. To cite one example, the enthusiastic
reception accorded Mizoguchi's historical films at Venice and Cannes in
the early 1950s, Kurosawa's adaptations of Shakespeare to medieval Japan,
or the ability of his Seven Samurai to reemerge as the quintessential
Western-all proof that medieval Japan was perhaps not so mysterious and
foreign after all-accord surprisingly well with an important thrust of
early postwar scholarship. I hope as a result to show that history is
a multimedia, multi-genre production and that only by paying attention
to the cross-traffic between official and unofficial forms of historical
knowledge can we begin to appreciate what it truly means to think of modern
society as saturated with history or to understand history as the defining
characteristic of modern life. |
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