Reischauer Institute Names Fellows

The new 1998-99 postdoctoral fellows have arrived at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. The Institute awards up to four of these fellowships each year in order to facilitate research to transform Ph.D. dissertations into publishable manuscripts. This year's recipents are as follows:

Mark McNally received a B.A. in East Asian studies from Pomona College in 1990, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Los Angeles. He spent three years on the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program from 1990 to 1993, living in the city of Nagoya. He has also studied abroad as an undergraduate at Nanzan University in Nagoya and International Christian University. His principal areas of academic interest are Tokugawa intellectual history, including Japanese Confucianism and nativism, late imperial Chinese intellectual history, Japanese social history, and contemporary literary and social theory. His dissertation is titled "Phantom History: Hirata Atsutane and Tokugawa Nativism."

Eric C. Rath received a B.A. in history from Skidmore College in 1989 and his Ph.D. in Japanese history from the University of Michigan in 1998. His principal research interest is premodern Japan, especially intellectual and cultural history, the performing arts, and the invention of tradition. Rath conducted his dissertation research in Japan from 1994 to 1996 at Osaka Foreign Language University and as a researcher in the Women's History Research Center at Kyoto Tachibana Women's College. His article, "The Aesthetic is Political: A Translation and Introduction to Tada Tomio's 'Well of Delusion,' " will appear in the forthcoming Out of Japan: Rereading Colonialism Past and Present, edited by Jennifer Robertson. His dissertation is entitled "Actors of Influence: Discourse and Institutional Growth in the History of Noh Theater."

John Michael Rogers received a B.A. in languages from International Christian University in 1985. He received an M.A. in sport history and philosophy from Nippon College of Physical Education in 1988, an A.M. in East Asian languages and civilizations from Harvard University in 1994, and a Ph.D. in East Asian languages and civilizations from Harvard in 1998. His research interests include Japanese social history, military history, and how non-Western societies make the transition from a traditional military to a modern military. Rogers recently published the article "Divine Destruction: The Shinpuren Rebellion of 1876" in New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan (E.J. Brill, 1997). His dissertation is entitled "The Development of the Military Profession in Tokugawa Japan."

Akihiko Uechi received M.A.'s in English linguistics from Kansai University of Foreign Studies and the University of Northern Iowa. He received his Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of British Columbia in 1998. His areas of academic interest are informatics, pragmatics, syntax, and phrasal phonology. He is particularly interested in investigating how phonology affects information structure and how information structure determines syntactic representations. His dissertation is entitled "Topicalized and Focused Phrases in Japanese."