Research Interests
Research Interests
My first book "Lost Histories: Recovering the Lives of Japan's Colonial Peoples" was published by 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 Native Americans in the United States), Okinawans, Taiwanese Aborigines and Micronesians. By focusing on individuals in different locations and following them as they crossed colonial borders to the metropolis and beyond I foreground the varied experiences of both the colonized and colonizer in the Japanese empire.
My second book project is tentatively entitled:The Disorder of Killing: Massacre, Suicide, and Escape at the Empire’s Edge and focuses on the lives and experiences of indigenous people and colonial subjects of the Japanese empire during wartime. The purpose of this project is to 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?
Articles
Articles
Kirsten Ziomek, "The Liminality of the Japanese Empire: Border-Crossings from Okinawa to Colonial Taiwan. By Hiroko Matsuda. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019," Monumenta Nipponica, 76:2 (2021): 404-411.
Kirsten Ziomek, “The View of the Japanese Enemy 75 years after the end of World War II: Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific 1944-1945.” By Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio, Reviews in American History vol. 48, no 4 (2020): 582-588.
Kirsten Ziomek, "From Idealism to the Ground: The Japanese Empire’s Occupation of Southeast Asia: The Japanese Occupation of Malaya and Singapore, 1941-45: A Social and Economic History. By Paul H. Kratoska. 2nd ed. Singapore: National University Press of Singapore, 2018. Japan’s Occupation of Java in the Second World War: A Transnational History. By Ethan Mark. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War. By Jeremy Yellen. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 79, no. 1 (2020): 241-248."
Kirsten Ziomek, "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 (2015): 123-50.
Kirsten Ziomek, "The 1903 Human Pavilion: Colonial Realities and Subaltern Subjectivities in Twentieth-Century Japan," The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 73 no. 2 (2014): 493-516.
Conference Presentations
Conference Presentations
Association for Asian Studies Conference, Honolulu, HI March 24-27, 2022
Organizer of Panel: “The Ruins of the Japanese Imperial Military and its Aftermath”
Paper title: “Private Revenge in the Wake of Defeat”
Discussant: Aaron Moore, University of Edinburgh
“Japan in the Long 1940s: A New History" Workshop (in person) University of Southern California, December 3, 2021
Invited paper: “SPY!: The Battle of Okinawa and the legacy of espionage – real secret agents, executed “traitors” – and the hunt for the enemy within”
Association for Asian Studies Conference, virtual, March 25-28, 2021
Presenter on Panel, “Reassessing Modern Japanese Military History as Method andFramework,”
Paper: “Dying in the Green Hell: The ethnoracial soldiers and laborers
undergirding the Japanese military in New Guinea”
Discussant: Andrew Gordon, Harvard University
Association for Asian Studies Conference, Denver, CO. March 21-24, 2019
Presenter on Panel: "Pushing the Boundaries in the Study of the Japanese Empire"
Paper: "Lost Histories: Recovering the Lives of Japan's Colonial Peoples"
Discussant: Jordan Sand, Georgetown University
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
Association for Asian Studies Conference, Taipei, Taiwan Association for Asian Studies Conference. Taipei, Taiwan June 22-24, 2015.
Panel: Rethinking the History of Wartime Taiwan
Paper: “Confronting the Last Frontiers of Aboriginal Resistance: Japanese policies directed toward the Bunun, 1933-1941”
Discussant: Chen Wei-chi, National Taiwan University
Japan Foundation Summer Institute: Modes of Japanese Multiculturalism: Coexistence and Marginality University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, June 20-24, 2012
Paper: "Locating Subaltern Subjectivities in the Formosa Hamlet at the 1910 Japan-British Exposition"
Association for Asian Studies Conference, Toronto, Canada March 15-17, 2012
Presenter on panel: “Alternate Ethnographies: Historical-Anthropological Perspectives on ‘Civilizing Missions’ in Asian Contexts”
Discussant: Oscar Salemink, University of Copenhagen
Association for Asian Studies Conference, Honolulu, HI March 31- April 3, 2011
Organizer and presenter on panel: "The Beauty in the Barbarian: Touring
Colonialism/Postcolonialism in the Japanese Empire"
Paper: “How to civilize a barbarian in ten days”
Discussant: David Howell, Harvard University
Boundaries in Question: Japanese and French Empires in East Asia
North Carolina State University, April 8-10, 2011 Convener: David Ambaras
Paper: “Welcome to the Empire: Subaltern Experiences at the 1912 Tokyo Colonial Exposition”
Cultural Typhoon, Tokyo Foreign Languages University, July 3, 2009
Organizer and Presenter on panel: "The Japanese Media during War and
Peace, Colonial and Post-Colonial Times: Examining the Intersections of
Media, Power and Cultural Production.”
Discussant: Yoshimi Shunya, University of Tokyo
Asian Studies Conference Japan (ASCJ), Sophia University, June 20, 2009
Presenter on panel: “Old Responsibilities Never Die: They Just Fade Away?
Approaching War Responsibility in Modern and Contemporary East Asia.”
Discussant: Nakao Katsumi, Oberlin University
Invited Presentations
Invited Presentations
North American Taiwan Studies Association Conference, George Washington University, D.C., July 8-10th 2022
Invited Roundtable: "Race, Ethnicity, and Nation—Comparisons and Connections between Taiwan, East Asia, and the United States"
Moderator: Jeffrey Weng | Sociology, National Taiwan University Panelists: Kirsten Ziomek | History, Adelphi University Ting-Hong Wong | Sociology, Academia Sinica Huei-Ying Kuo | Sociology, Johns Hopkins University Wei-Chi Chen | Taiwanese History, Academia Sinica
Keynote speaker for two day online conference: “WWII in the Asia-Pacific: Border Crossing Mobilities,” July 18th and 19th 2022, Ritsumeikan University, Tokyo
Radical History Book Talk series, University of Munich, June 15, 2022 (zoom) on Lost Histories
Invited speaker for a Takashima talk, “SPY! The hunt for the enemy within during the Battle of Okinawa and the Asia-Pacific War” Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Santa Barbara, in person, May 18, 2022
In person guest lecture on “Japan’s colonial subjects at war” for Laura Hein’s WWII class, Northwestern University, Evanston Il, October 11, 2021
Guest lecturer for Honors College humanities lecture series, October 4th and October 6, 2021, Adelphi University
Taiwan Talks, Guest director and moderator for a three part Zoom series
sponsored by the Center for Taiwan Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, April-May 2021. Panels include: “Gender and Empire,” “Taiwan at War” and “Taiwan’s East Asia”
Invited book talk, USC East Asian Center, "New Books in Modern Japan Series," Zoom, November 6, 2020
Invited Book Talk, Lost Histories: Japan's Colonial Peoples and World War II at the University of Tennesse Chattanooga, January 15, 2020
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
“The Human Pavilion of 1903” University of Tokyo, ITASIA Colloquium Series April 7, 2009
Discussant: Jordan Sand, Georgetown University
“An Empire on Display” Yokohama City University, July 8, 2008
Grants
Grants
• 2022 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
• 2021 Adelphi University Faculty Development Grant
• 2018 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
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