Modern Japan History Association Dissertation Prize
The 1st annual Modern Japan History Association Dissertation Prize will be awarded in early 2025 to an outstanding English-language PhD dissertation or thesis on modern Japan or Japanese history filed in 2023.
Prize
The winner will receive a monetary prize of $1,000 USD.
Guidelines for Submission
- Full consideration will be given to PhD dissertations or theses substantially illuminating the history of modern and contemporary Japan (1868-present), as well as dissertations exploring the historical roots of modern Japanese society and culture. Provided this condition is met, dissertations from any academic discipline and covering earlier eras of history are eligible.
- Dissertations must be originally written in English. Dissertations originally filed in other languages will not be considered.
- Only PhD or doctoral dissertations are eligible. Masters theses or undergraduate theses will not be considered.
- Dissertations must have been filed in calendar year 2023.
- Dissertators need not be members of the MJHA.
- Only MJHA members may nominate a thesis/dissertation for consideration.
- Dissertations and theses written by MJHA student members will be automatically considered. Simply fill out the nomination form found in the "Members Area" of this website.
Deadline
Nominations must be received by June 1, 2024 to be eligible for the 2025 award.
Nomination Form
Only MJHA members may nominate a thesis/dissertation for consideration. If you are a current MJHA member, please fill out the nomination form found in the "Members Area" of this website. If you would like to join MJHA, please sign up HERE.
2025 Prize Committee
SEIJI SHIRANE (Chair)
City College of New York
KÄREN WIGEN
Stanford University
LORI WATT
Washington University in St. Louis
2024 MJHA Dissertation Prize Finalists
1. Dana Mirsalis, Gendering the Shinto Priesthood in Postwar Japan (Harvard University, East Asian Languages and Cultures, 2022)
2. Minami Nishioka, The Gospel of Civilization: Missionaries and Okinawans under U.S. and Japanese Empires, 1846-1939 (University of Tennesee Knoxville, History, 2022)
3. 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 MJHA 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.