Morten Oxenboell, Director of the East Asian Studies Center at IU Bloomington, will be a guest speaker at the IUN College of Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Conference in the Anderson Library Conference Center 105C between 1-2 pm on Apr. 20. The topic of his talk is “Violence and Local Governance in Weak State Societies: Lessons from Medieval Japan, c. 1200—1400”.
Professor Oxenboell got his Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen in Japanese history. He is an expert in Japanese medieval violence, exploring multiple social and cultural meanings of violence and conflict from the belief that they can raise new questions about the role and status of violence today. He has studied non-governmental violent actors and their significance for state formations and the development of conflict mediation strategies between centers and peripheries. Aside from conflict studies, Dr. Oxenboell examines the premodern political and social history, the culture of violence, martial suicide, and early modern Japanese visions of the medieval past. He has also introduced considerable comparative elements, where he examines similar phenomena in European medieval contexts, as well as in other societies with a relatively low degree of central control. His book Akutō: Rural Conflicts in Medieval Japan, published in 2018, offers the first in-depth analysis in English of an understudied phenomenon in medieval Japanese history: the so-called akutō (literally, “evil bands”). Professor Oxenboell has also published multiple book chapters and journal articles in venues that include the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, History and Theory, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Historisk Tidsskrift, and Monomenta Nipponica.
Professor Oxenboell is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Paul V. McNutt and Kathleen McNutt Watson Professorship in Japanese Studies, Indiana University from 2017-2022, the Mellon Innovating International Research, Teaching, and Collaboration Award, New Frontiers of Creativity and Scholarship Award at IU, and the Mosaic senior faculty fellowship at IU, among others.
The recorded lecture is available at the IUN EAS Gateway website, under Past-Events.
For a complete schedule of the 19th IUN COAS Undergraduate Research Conference, please check here.
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