Full day workshop featuring 3 sessions.
This international workshop will shed light on the way concepts of modernity developed under changing political constellations involving Europe, Japan, and East Asia. With a focus on Japanese political thought in East Asian and global contexts, the workshop will look at Japan’s status in conceptualisations of modernity as a phenomenon beyond European historical teleologies. In doing so, it will reconsider the meaning of ‘European modernity’ from the perspective of Japan. Stepping away from a model of knowledge transfer which views Western knowledge and institutions as exports to Japan, it will present a more multidirectional picture of knowledge circulation in East Asian as well as in global contexts.
In the first part of the event (session 1 and 2), participants will be invited on a curated tour of the British Museum’s Japanese collections with Curators Dr Akiko Yano and Joe Nickols, as well as having an opportunity of looking at a curated set of objects from the British Museum’s collections in a study room session.
In the second part (session 3), the workshop will spotlight cutting-edge research on Japanese intellectual history by scholars based in Japan, whose work has not been widely introduced in the UK. Professor Ōkubo Takeharu will present his recent biographical study of Fukuzawa Yukichi, one of Japan’s most canonical modern thinkers, in relation to the Rangaku (Dutch Studies) tradition in Japan. Dr Ryu Aerim, whose recent monograph explores the reception of Alexis de Tocqueville in modern Japan, will also present her current research. The response by Professor Kiri Paramore will reflect on these presentations from broader East Asian and global perspectives.
Programme:
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(5pm - 7pm) SESSION 3 - MAIN PANEL: ‘Non-European Modernity: Modern Japanese and East Asian Ideas of the West in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries', featuring our three speakers, Prof Takeharu, Prof Paramore and Dr Ryu (Venue: MAR.1.08, Marshall Building, LSE)
Meet our speakers:
OKUBO Takeharu, Ph.D. (2004, Tokyo Metropolitan University), is a Professor of the History of Asian and Japanese Political Thought at Keio University, Japan and a visiting scholar at Leiden University's Institute for Area Studies since September 2024. He has numerous publications regarding global intellectual history, especially in the cultural interaction between the Netherlands and Japan. His publications include The Quest for Civilization: Encounters with Dutch Jurisprudence, Economics and Statistics at the Dawn of Modern Japan, (translated by David Noble, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), “The Concept of Rights in Modern Japan”, in Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory, (eds. Leigh Jenco et al., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), Kindai Nihon no Seiji Kōsō to Oranda (University of Tokyo Press, Expanded Revised Edition, 2022), FUKUZAWA Yukichi: Saigo no Rangakusha (Kodansha, 2023).
Kiri Paramore is Professor of Asian Studies in the National University of Ireland, University College Cork, where he directs the Irish Institute of Chinese Studies and the Irish Institute of Japanese Studies. He is the author of Japanese Confucianism: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 2016), (a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award winner, 2016), Ideology and Christianity in Japan (Routledge, 2009), and Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies (Bloomsbury, 2016). His articles have appeared in Modern Intellectual History, the Journal of Asian Studies, the Journal of Early Modern History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of Japanese Studies, and the Proceedings of the British Academy, etc. He currently serves as chief editor of the Cambridge History of Confucianism, and as one of the authors of the Cambridge History of Democracy, and the New Cambridge History of Japan.
Ryu Aerim, Ph.D. (2019, University of Tokyo), is an Associate Professor of the History of Political Thought at the Faculty of Law, Kyushu University. Her research focuses on modern Japanese political thought, particularly the reception of Western thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Carlyle from the Meiji to Showa periods. She is the author of Tokubiru to Meiji Shisōshi: “Demokurashī” no Hatten to Bōkyaku (Tocqueville and the Intellectual History of Meiji Japan: The Discovery and Oblivion of “Democracy”) which received the 8th Yoshino Sakuzo Research Award (Grand Prize) in 2023. She is interested in examining how Japanese intellectuals appropriated the ideas of Western thinkers during a period of modernization and political transformation, contributing to a deeper understanding of cross-cultural exchanges in political thought.
(Chair of the event) Dina Gusejnova is Associate Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Dina completed her studies and her PhD in History at the University of Cambridge and has taught at the universities of Chicago, UCL, Queen Mary University of London and Sheffield. She is the author of European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-57 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and the editor of Cosmopolitanism in Conflict: Imperial Encounters from the Seven Years’ War to the Cold War (Palgrave, 2018). Her recent publications (for instance, as co-editor, ‘Wartime internment in camps as a global practice and experience’, a Special Issue of Immigrants & Minorities (2025)) deal with the cultural and intellectual impact of wars, internment and displacement on the history of ideas, both from a historical and from a contemporary perspective.
This event has been made possible by kind donations from the Daiwa Foundation
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