Louise Young

Position title: Professor of History

Phone: 608.263.1829

Address:
Office: 4102 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 4022 Mosse Humanities
Office Hours: TBA

Biography

I am a social and cultural historian of modern Japan. My research and teaching interests include Japanese international relations, World War Two in Asia, comparative imperialism, and urban history. I am currently working on two book projects. The Idea of Class in Modern Japan is a social and intellectual history of the transition from a feudal status system to a modern class hierarchy, 1860-1940. Rethinking Japanese Imperialism examines Japan in the world as a history of the present, tracing this history from the forced opening of the Japanese market in the mid nineteenth century to the current conjuncture, with the rise of neo-nationalisms in Asia and the challenge to the neo-liberal world order.

Professor Young is not currently accepting incoming graduate students for academic year 2025-26.

Education

Ph.D., Columbia University
M.A., Columbia University
B.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison

Books

Louise Young. Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan. University of California Press, 2013.
Louise Young. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. University of California Press, 1998.

Selected Publications

“When Fascism Met Empire in Japanese-occupied Manchuria,” (pdf) in special issue on Axis Empires: toward a global history of fascist imperialism, Journal of Global History, Vol.12, no. 2 (June 2017): 274-296.
“Rethinking Empire in the Twentieth Century: Lessons from Imperial and Post-imperial Japan,” (pdf) in The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire, eds., Andrew Thompson and Martin Thomas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
“Urban Life and the City Idea in the Twentieth Century,” in Handbook of Modern Japanese History, eds., Christopher W.A. Szpilman and Sven Saalar. London: Routledge, 2017.
“Japan’s New International History,” (pdf) introduction to AHR Forum: Early- Twentieth-Century Japan in a Global Context, American Historical Review, 119, 4 (October 2014): 1117-1129.
“Ideologies of Difference and the Turn to Atrocity: Japan’s War on China,” in A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937-1945, eds., Roger Chickering, Stig Forster, and Berndt Greiner. London: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
“Japan at War: History-writing on the Crisis of the 1930s”, in The Origins of the Second World War, Reconsidered (Rev. ed., Routledge 1999).
“Marketing the Modern: Department Stores, Consumer Culture and the New Middle Class in Interwar Japan”, in International Labor and Working-Class History (No. 55, Spring 1999)

Advisor To

History Courses

History 104 – Introduction to East Asian History: Japan – Syllabus 2017 (pdf)
History 200 – Historical Studies: The Atomic Bomb in American and Japanese History – Syllabus 2021 (pdf)
History 201 – The Historian’s Craft: How Do Empires End? Defeat, Occupation and Post-Imperial Japan – Syllabus 2021 (pdf)
History 455 – Japans Modern Century, 1853-1952: Rise & Fall of the Imperial State
History 456 – Japan and World War Two in Asia – Syllabus 2020 (pdf)
History 500 – Reading Seminar: Japanese Imperialism – Syllabus 2023 (pdf)
History 500 – Reading Seminar: The Atomic Bomb in American and Japanese History – Syllabus 2021 (pdf)
History 600 – Militarism and Fascism in Japan – Syllabus 2007 (pdf)
History 600 – Japanese Urbanism – Syllabus 2011 (pdf)
History 680/690 – Honors Thesis Colloquium
History 703 – History and Theory
History 710 – Professional Development Seminar – Grant Writing Proposals – Syllabus 2023 (pdf)
History 725 – Seminar in East Asian History: Postimperial Japan and Asia – Syllabus 2020 (pdf)
History 855 – Historiography of Modern Japan – Syllabus 2020 (pdf)
History 855 – Theory/History/Japan – Syllabus 2022 (pdf)
History 855 – Modern Japan as Chronotope – Syllabus 2017 (pdf)