New Books on Japan: "Renaming Plants and Nations in Japanese Colonial Korea"

Thursday, January 22, 2026 | 8:00-9:30 PM ET

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Renaming Plants and Nations in Japanese Colonial Korea (Routledge, 2025)

Presenter: Jung Lee, Assistant Professor, Ewha Women's University

Discussant: Ian Miller, Reischauer Institute Professor of Environmental History, Harvard University

Moderator: Joseph Seeley, Assistant Professor of History, University of Virginia

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Jung Lee, who will be speaking about her new book Renaming Plants and Nations in Japanese Colonial Korea (Routledge, 2025). This book studies a striking example of intensely negotiated colonial scientific practice: the case of botanical practice in Korea during the Japanese colonization from 1910 to 1945. The shared aim of botanists who encountered one another in colonial Korea to practice “modern Western botany” is successfully revealed through analysis of their fieldwork and subsequent publications. By exploring the variations in what that term should mean and the politically charged nature of the interactions between both imperial and colonial players, Renaming Plants and Nations reveals how botanists of the region created a form of scientific practice that was neither clearly Western nor particularly modern. It shows how the botany that evolved in this context was a product of colonially resourced, globally connected practice, immersed in intertwined traditions, rather than simply a copy of “modern Western botany.” Ian Miller (Harvard) will serve as interlocutor.