TALK: Sanguinary Laws and Horrid Tortures: Punishment and Civilization in Tokugawa Japan’s Encounter with the West
Daniel Botsman (Harvard)
Friday, April 9 / 12:00 PM / FREE
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, UCSB

Professor Botsman considers how, around the time of Commodore Perry’s arrival to “open” the country to trade and “friendly relations,” a small, but influential group of Japanese thinkers became interested in descriptions of America’s fledgling penitentiary system which they encountered in texts imported from China and goes on to explore how Enlightenment ideas about punishment and civilization were intimately linked to the European project of empire. Daniel Botsman is Associate Professor of History at Harvard University. His upcoming book, Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Co-sponsored by the IHC’s East Asian Cultural Studies Research Focus Group, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, the Department of History, and the East Asia Center

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