Assistant Professor
History
Blodgett Hall Room 200E
516.877.4792
516.877.4797
KZIOMEK@ADELPHI.EDU
Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara (2011)
B.A., Northwestern University (2002)
History Of East Asia II
Seminar In The Humanities: The Asia Pacific War: Regarding The Pain Of Others
The Asia Pacific War: Regarding The Pain Of Others
World Civilizations I I
Japanese empire, imperialism, colonial subjects, indigenous people, visual culture, the Asia-Pacific War, gendered mobility, cultural history,East Asia, Modern Japan, World History and empires
My first book manuscript is titled: "Lost Histories: Recovering the Lives of Japan's Colonial Peoples" forthcoming from Harvard University Asia Center in 2019. Within one study, I transcend geographic colonial borders and examine numerous locations of empire, as well as the experiences of four distinct groups of Japanese colonial subjects: the Ainu (the indigenous people of northern Japan, Hokkaido, akin to the Native Americans in the United States), Okinawans, Taiwanese Aborigines and Micronesians. By focusing on individuals in different locations and following them as they crossed geographic colonial borders to the metropolis and to other colonies I foreground the varied experiences of both the colonized and colonizer in the Japanese empire.
My second book project is a re-examination of World War II in the Asia- Pacific region and will focus on the lives and experiences of the indigenous people and colonial subjects of the Japanese empire. It re-visits famous battles and scenes of war in the Japanese empire and its outlying regions. The purpose of this project is use war as a lens to focus on issues of individual mobility and experience, thereby problematizing war as a site where colonial relationships were reconfigured in unexpected ways. This means moving beyond understandings of colonized subjects as monochromatic victims, or as people who fought for the empire in order to become “Japanese” nationals. Rather, I find in some cases, colonized subjects who as soldiers were aggressors and perpetuators of violence. I hope to examine flashpoints throughout the war when the experiences of war disrupted colonial identities to the point of near obliteration. Is war the ultimate leveler, or do the boundaries of colonial subjecthood only shift and never break?
Lost Histories: Recovering the Lives of Japan's Colonial Peoples (Harvard University Asia Center, forthcoming 2019)
Kirsten Ziomek, ed. (2013). The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles. The Asia-Pacific Journal, Course reader no.8.
Kirsten Ziomek (2015), The Possibility of Liminal Colonial Subjecthood: Yayutz Bleyh and the Search for Subaltern Histories in the Japanese Empire. Critical Asian Studies, vol. 47 no. 1, 123-50.
Kirsten Ziomek (2014), The 1903 Human Pavilion: Colonial Realities and Subaltern Subjectivities in Twentieth-Century Japan. The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 73 no. 2.
Association for Asian Studies Conference, Washington D.C. March 22-25, 2018
Presenter on Panel: "The Japanese Empire and its Non-National Actors"
Paper: "The Takasago giyutai in the Philippines"
Discussant: Ethan Mark, Leiden University
European Association of Japanese Studies Conference, Lisbon, Portugal August 30- Sept 2nd, 2017
Presenter on Panel: "Meiji Colonialism in Hokkaido and Transnational Colonial Exchanges"
Paper: "Human Displays and the Ainu, 1903-1913"
Discussant: Michele Mason, University of Maryland, College Park
Association for Asian Studies Conference, Toronto, Canada March 16--19, 2017
Organizer and presenter on Panel: "Servicemen in Total War: Racial Disunity, Disabled Bodies, and Alienation in the Japanese Empire"
Paper: "A War We Have Nothing to Do With: Ainu Soldiers in the Asia-Pacific War"
Discussant: Aaron Moore, University of Manchester
Kirsten Ziomek (2015). Panel: Rethinking the History of Wartime Taiwan, Paper: “Confronting the Last Frontiers of Aboriginal Resistance: Japanese policies directed toward the Bunun, 1933-1941”. In Association for Asian Studies Conference. Taipei, Taiwan.
Presenter: Kirsten Ziomek (2012). Locating Subaltern Subjectivities in the Formosa Hamlet at the 1910 Japan-British Exposition. In Japan Foundation Summer Institute: Modes of Japanese Multiculturalism: Coexistence and Marginality. University of California, Santa Barbara, CA.
Presenter: Kirsten Ziomek, Discussant: Oscar Salemink (2012). Alternate Ethnographies: Historical Anthropological Perspectives on Civilizing Missions in Asian Contexts. In Association for Asian Studies Conference. Toronto, Canada.
Presenter: Kirsten Ziomek, Convener: David Ambaras (2011). Welcome to the Empire: Subaltern Experiences at the 1912 Tokyo Colonial Exposition. In Boundaries in Question: Japanese and French Empires in East Asia. North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC.
Organizer and Presenter: Kirsten Ziomek, Discussant: David Howell (2011). The Beauty in the Barbarian: Touring Colonialism/Postcolonialism in the Japanese Empire. In Association for Asian Studies Conference. Honolulu, HI.
Organizer and Presenter: Kirsten Ziomek, Discussant Yoshimi Shunya (2009). The Japanese Media during War and Peace, Colonial and Post-Colonial Times. In Cultural Typhoon. Tokyo, Japan.
Presenter: Kirsten Ziomek, Discussant: Katsumi Nakao (2009). Old Responsibilities Never Die: They Just Fade Away? Approaching War Responsibility in Modern and Contemporary East Asia. In Asian Studies Conference Japan. Tokyo, Japan.
Invited Presenter: Kirsten Ziomek (2009). The Human Pavilion of 1903. In ITASIA Colloquium Series. University of Tokyo, Japan.
Invited Speaker: Kirsten Ziomek (2008). An Empire on Display. Yokohma City University, Japan.
Speaker and Moderator for “Teach-In on Tensions related to North Korea”
November 14,2017, Nexus Center, Adelphi Room, Adelphi University
“Condoned Savagery: The untold stories of the first unit of the Taiwanese Aborigine Volunteer Army in the Philippines, 1942” at Columbia University, Modern Japan Seminar, October 19, 2017 Professor Brandon Schechter (NYU) discussant.
Discussant for Associate Professor Miriam Kingsberg’s talk:” The Making of Japan’s Malinowski” at Columbia University, Modern Japan Seminar, December 15, 2016.
“From Rehabilitation to Execution: Imperial Japanese Policies toward Taiwan’s Indigenous People, 1932-1942 “The Lees History seminars” at Rutgers University, April 8, 2016. Discussant: Frederick Dickinson, University of Pennsylvania
• 2017 Northeast Asia Council (NEAC) of the Association for Asian Studies with the support of the Japan- U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) U.S. Research travel grant
• 2015 Adelphi Faculty Development Grant to conduct research in Taiwan
• 2011-2013 Hamilton College Asian Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship
• NEAC of the Association for Asian Studies and JUSFC grant awarded to
Kirsten Ziomek on behalf of Hamilton College, hosting Dr.James Huffman's public presentation on "Japan Imperialism: Unique or Typical?"on February 21, 2013
• Japan Foundation Graduate Fellowship
Spring 2011
• University of California Santa Barbara Department of History
Dissertation Writing Fellowship, Winter 2011
• University of California Pacific Rim Research Program Doctoral Dissertation
Research Fellowship, 2009-2010
• Fulbright IIE Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship
Sept. 2008-Dec. 2009
Affiliation: University of Tokyo
Inter-Faculty Initiative in Information Studies Graduate School
• Japan Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship 2008-2009
(declined in favor of Fulbright)
• United States Department of Education (Title IV) Foreign Languages and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS) for Japanese language study Summers 2008 and 2007 Full year 2006-2007 and 2005-2006
• Joseph E. and Gina Laun Jannotta Foundation Prize, June 2008
Grant awarded to best research conducted by a graduate student in the East Asia region at the University of California, Santa Barbara
• University of California Santa Barbara Department of History
Research Travel Grant, Spring 2008
• University of California Pacific Rim Research Program Mini-grant
Awarded to conduct research in Sapporo, Japan, March 2008
• Kosciuszko Foundation Tuition Scholarship, 2007-2008 and 2006-2007