Naoko Shimazu
Humanities (History)
Professor
Email: naoko.shimazu@yale-nus.edu.sg
Professor Naoko Shimazu joined Yale-NUS College in 2016 after 20 years of teaching at the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck University of London. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Political Studies at the University of Manitoba, followed by Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in International Relations at the University of Oxford. For three years, she worked as a merchant banker in the City of London. She has a joint professorial appointment with the Asia Research Institute, and an honorary professorship at the Department of History, National University of Singapore. She has held fellowships at the University of Tokyo, Waseda University, European University Institute (Florence), University of Sydney, and Sciences Po Paris. She has been the recipient of research grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of United Kingdom, British Academy, and Leverhulme Trust, and USPC-NUS Fund. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Professor Shimazu is a global historian of Asia, and is currently working extensively in the cultural history of global diplomacy, with a particular focus on methodological explorations. In addition, her research interests concern the social and cultural history of modern societies at war, and new approaches to the study of empire. Her case studies derive from the twentieth-century, focusing on Japan, and more broadly on Asia, including Asia’s engagements with the world. Together with Dr Christian Goeschel (University of Manchester), she is the Editor of the Oxford Handbook on the Cultural History of Global Diplomacy (forthcoming 2024). She is completing two edited volume projects: The Russian Revolution in Asia (Routledge, forthcoming, with Sabine Dullin, Rachel Lin, and Etienne Peyrat), and Reading Diplomatic Images: Cold War Asia (with Matthew Phillips). Last but not least, she continues to work on completing her monograph, Diplomacy as Theatre: The Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Making of the Third World.
Books and Edited Volumes:
Imagining Japan in Postwar East Asia: Identity Politics, Schooling and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2013), co-edited with Paul Morris and Edward Vickers.
Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and the Russo-Japanese War (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Nationalisms in Japan (Routledge, 2006), editor.
Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (Routledge, 1998).
Select Articles and Chapter Contributions:
‘A Historiographical Turn: Evolving Interpretations of Japan during World War I’ (co-authored with Jan Schmidt), in Christoph Cornelissen and Arndt Weinrich, eds., Writing the Great War: The Historiography of World War I from 1918 to the Present (Oxford: Berghahn, 2020), pp. 338-367.
‘Publicizing Colonies: Representations of “Korea” and “Koreans” in NIPPON’, Yong Chool Ha, ed., International Impact on Colonial Rule in Korea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019), pp. 236-260.
‘What is Sociability in Diplomacy?’, Diplomatica: A Journal of Diplomacy and Society 1 (April 2019), 56-72. doi10.1163/25891774-00101009
‘A Cultural History of Diplomacy: Reassessing the Japanese “Performance” at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919’, in Urs Matthias Zachmann, ed., After Versailles: Asian Perspectives on the Paris Peace Conference and the Interwar Order, 1919-1933 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2017), pp. 101-123.
‘Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955’, Modern Asian Studies, 48:1 (January 2014): 225-252.
‘Places in Diplomacy’, Guest Editorial, Political Geography 31:6 (2012): 335-336.
‘Colonial Encounters: Japanese Travel Writing on Colonial Taiwan’, Yuko Kikuchi, ed. Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), pp. 21-37.
‘Popular Representations of the Past: The Case of Postwar Japan’, Journal of Contemporary History 38:1 (January 2003): 101-116.
‘The Myth of the Patriotic Soldier: Japanese Attitudes towards Death in the Russo-Japanese War’, War and Society 19:2 (October 2001): 69-89.
Comparative Social Inquiry
History Capstone Seminar
The Bandung Conference of 1955 (Historical Immersion)
The Japanese Empire in Global History (Intermediate History)