MIRIAM R SILVERBERG

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Office: 6265 BUNCHE
Phone: 54601
Fax: 310-206-9630
E-mail: silverbe@history.ucla.edu

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Field

Japan, Modern Japanese Thought, Culture, Social Transformation; Social and Cultural Theory; Comparative Historiography

Research Interests

My goal in my work is to ask new questions and to encourage students and my readers to do the same. At a time when disciplinary boundaries and established traditions in area studies are being questioned, we have an opportunity to reflect on why and how we should look at the past, in dialogue with scholars in Japan.

Selected Publications

Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Awarded John King Fairbank Award, 1990. Japanese language version forthcoming, Heibonsha Publishers, Tokyo, Japan.

"Marxism Addresses the Modern: Nakano Shigeharu's Reproduction of Taisho Culture." In J. Thomas Rimer, Ed. Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 133-153.

"The Modern Girl As Militant ." In Gail Bernstein, Ed. Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991.

"Constructing a New Cultural History of Modern Japan" Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture, Duke University Press. Special Issue on "Japan in the World." Vol. 18 No. 3. Fall 1991:61-89; in Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian, Ed., Japan in the World. Duke: Duke University Press, 1993.

"Constructing the Japanese Ethnography of Modernity." Journal of Asian Studies. 51 No.1 (February 1992):30-54.

"Osmanthus" (Translation of short story by Ozaki Midori). Manoa, vol. 3, No.2, Fall 1991: 187-19O. [broadcast over KCRW as part of Japanese short story series Summer 1994

"Remembering Pearl Harbor, Forgetting Charlie Chaplin, and the Case of the Disappearing Western Woman." Solicited for first issue of Positions (new journal of East Asian history and culture). Positions: First issue, special issue on "Colonial Modernity" Vol. 1 No. 1, Spring 1993, pp. 24- 76.

"Nihon no Jokyu wa Buruusu wo Utatta," (The Japanese Cafe Waitress Sang the Blues" in Wakita Haruko, ed. Gendaa no Nihonshi [A Japanese History of Gender] (Tokyo University Press: 1995).

"Advertising Every Body: Images from the Japanese Modern Years" in Susan Foster, Ed. Choreographing History (Indiana University Press, 1995).

"The Inventions of the Modern Cafe Waitress," in Stephen Vlaston, Ed. Mirror of Modernity:The Japanese Invention of Tradition, (University of California Press).

"Onna Seiyo jin" in Mitsuta Ikuo, Ed. Nakano Shigeharu.

TRANSNATIONAL WIVES’ TALES: Yonsama as Postcolonial Ghost and the Revenge of the Obatarians (letter from Los Angeles).

War Responsibility Revisited: Auschwitz in Japan.

"And Some Not So Bad," in Jan Bardsley and Laura Miller, eds. Bad Girls of Japan. (Palgrave Press, 2005).

Forthcoming publications:

Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: Japanese Mass Culture in the '20s and '30s (University of California Press).
A cultural and intellectual history of Japan during the "modern years," focusing the draw of the West, gender in flux, and popular satire.

After the Grand Tour: Modern Girls, New Women, and Colonial Maidens in the Modern Girl Collective, ed. Modern Girls Around the World. (Duke University Press).

Work in Progress:

Japanese Women in Revolution: A Century of History. An intellectual-biographical history of five Japanese activist women (from feminist anarchist to cartoon heroine) spanning the early twentieth century into the present.

Intimacy Across Gender and Culture, East and West, a Reader. Co-edited with Madonna Hettinger.

Essays on Japan at War.

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