2024 Charlotte J. Conroy Dissertation Prize Finalists

Dana Mirsalis, Gendering the Shinto Priesthood in Postwar Japan (Harvard University, East Asian Languages and Cultures, 2022)

Minami Nishioka, The Gospel of Civilization: Missionaries and Okinawans under U.S. and Japanese Empires, 1846-1939 (University of Tennesee Knoxville, History, 2022)

Jonas Rüegg, The Kuroshio Frontier: Business, State and Environment in the Making of Japan’s Pacific (Harvard University, History and East Asian Languages, 2022)

2024 Charlotte J. Conroy Dissertation Prize Winner

Jonas Rüegg

Author of The Kuroshio Frontier: Business, State and Environment in the Making of Japan’s Pacific (Harvard University, History and East Asian Languages, 2022)

Kuroshio Frontier adopts an oceanic perspective to shed new light on nineteenth-century Japan's geopolitical, material, and intellectual engagements with the broader Pacific world. Drawing upon extensive, original archival research, Jonas Rüegg chronicles the efforts of a diverse group of historical actors—including whalers, sailors, farmers, laborers, guano miners, castaways and urban intellectuals—to, each in their own way, help expand the reach of Japan’s economic, people, and ideas beyond the bounds of the Japan Current (Kuroshio) that had greatly inhibited oceanic travel prior to the modern era. Rüegg’s fascinating and wide-ranging study adroitly surfs the currents of recent trends of environmental, maritime, and oceanic history to uncover important trajectories, continuities, and discontinuities as Japan traversed the transition from the early modern to the modern period.