Awards for 20th Century Japan Research
Each year, the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies and the University of Maryland Libraries invite applications for grants to support research in the Libraries' Gordon W. Prange Collection and the East Asian Studies resources on topics related to the period of the Allied Occupation of Japan and its aftermath, 1945-1960. Holders of a Ph.D. or an equivalent degree are eligible to apply, as are graduate students who have completed all requirements for the doctorate except the dissertation. The competition is open to scholars in all parts of the world and from any discipline, but historical topics are preferred. University of Maryland faculty, staff, and students may not apply.
We are now accepting applications for the Award 2025. Please see this document for more information.
Award Recipients
| Year | Name | Affiliation | Title | Research Topic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Suhyun Choi | Columbia University | Ph.D candidate | "Transnational Socialism and the Development of Realist Painting in Japan and North Korea, 1945-1980" |
| 2024 | Eike Exner | "A Comparative Study of Visual Influences Seen in Occupation-era Manga” | ||
| 2023 | Zhizhi (Stella) Li | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Ph.D candidate | "Jazz in the Nightclubs: The Off-Limit Music World of Occupied Japan, 1945–1952" |
| 2023 | Benjamin Uchiyama | University of Southern California | Associate Professor | |
| 2020 | Camila Gutierrez | Pennsylvania State University | Ph.D. Candidate | "Gendered Visual Narratives: Chicana, Latin American, and Japanese modes of telling" |
| 2020 | Daniel Milne | Kyoto University/Ritsumeikan University | Lecturer | "Seeds of the Revival of Postwar Tourism in Occupied Japan" |
| 2018-2019 | Alisa Freedman | University of Oregon | Professor | "Discursive Construction of the Japanese Female University Student During the Occupation Era" |
| 2018-2019 | Timothy Smith | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Ph.D. Candidate | "Clean Minds, Messy Realities: Shifting Trends in Contemporary Tenrikyo" |
| 2017-2018 | W. Evan Young | Dickinson College | Assistant Professor | “Health and Home in Occupation-Era Japan: Women’s Magazines and Domestic Medical Care” |
| 2017-2018 | Emily Cole | University of Oregon | Ph.D. Candidate | "Life in the Ruins: Photography during the Allied Occupation of Japan, 1945-1952" |
| 2016-2017 | Robert Hegwood | University of Pennsylvania | Ph.D. Candidate | "Diasporic Diplomacy: The intermediary role that Japanese Americans (Nikkei) played in a grassroots campaign to change American perceptions of postwar Japan" |
| 2015-2016 | Anastasia Fedorova | Hokkaido University | Postdoctoral Fellow | "Marxist Thought and Soviet Culture in Early Cold War Japan" |
| 2015-2016 | Miriam Kingsberg | University of Colorado | Professor | "The Objectivity Generation: Japanese Human Scientists in the Transwar World" |
| 2015-2016 | Lauri Kitsnik | University of Cambridge | Ph.D. Candidate | "The Theory and Practice of Scriptwriting during the Allied Occupation" |
| 2014-2015 | Vanessa Ward | University of Otago | Professor | "Publishing Progressive Thought in Occupied Japan" |
| 2014-2015 | Shota Ogawa | University of North Carolina at Charlotte | Professor | "Imagining Natural Color: Impact of Color Film on Occupation-era Paper Media" |
| 2013-2014 | Julia Bullock | Emory University | Professor | "Coeducation in Japan under Allied Occupation" |
| 2013-2014 | Deokhyo Choi | University of Cambridge | Postdoctoral Fellow | "Crucible of the Post-Empire: Decolonization, Race, and Cold War Politics in U.S.-Japan-Korea Relations, 1945-1952" |
| 2013-2014 | Emer O'Dwyer | Oberlin College | Professor | "Searching for 'Truth' in Occupation-Era Magazines" |
| 2012-2013 | Jessamyn Abel | Pennsylvania State University | Senior Lecturer | "Locomotives of Postwar Recovery: Development of the Bullet Train" |
| 2011-2012 | Charlotte Eubanks | Pennsylvania State University | Professor | "Archival Memory: The Marukis and the Politics of Visual Culture in Trans-War Japan" |
| 2011-2012 | Ryan Holmberg | Gakushuin University | Postdoctoral Fellow | "Ten Cent Manga: American Comics and the Rise of Gekiga" |
| 2011-2012 | Jolyon Thomas | Princeton University | Ph.D. Candidate | "Japan's Preoccupation with Religious Freedom, 1890-1947" |
| 2010-2011 | Justin Jesty | University of Chicago | Ph.D. Candidate | "Art and Social Movements in Postwar Japan, 1945-1960" |
| 2009-2010 | No awards were given. | |||
| 2008-2009 | Franziska Seraphim | Boston College | Professor | "Public Responses to the Allied War Crimes Program and SCAP's Purge" |
| 2008-2009 | Aiko Takeuchi | Brown University | Ph.D. Candidate | "Social Discussions over Female Reproduction in Postwar Japan" |
| 2007-2008 | Erik Esselstrom | University of Vermont | Professor | "The Politics of Thought Crime in Wartime and Occupied Japan" |
| 2007-2008 | Ann Sherif | Oberlin College | Professor | "The Influence of Progressive, Leftist, Religious and Regional Publishers on Art, Activism and Academia During the Occupation" |
| 2006-2007 | Kyoko Omori | Hamilton College | Professor | "The Culture of Japanese Vernacular Modernism, 1920-1950" |
| 2006-2007 | Maki Umemura | London School of Economics | Ph.D. Candidate | "The Pharmaceutical Industry in Japan since 1945" |
| 2005-2006 | Takashi Nishiyama | MIT | Postdoctoral Fellow | "Former Military Scientists and Engineers, 1919-1964," and "Labor Activism in the Japan National Railways, 1945-1955" |
| 2005-2006 | Alicia Volk | University of London | Postdoctoral Fellow | "Democratizing Japanese Art, 1945-1960" |
| 2004-2005 | Julia Adeney Thomas | Notre Dame University | Professor | "Photography and Democracy: Between History and Sex in Occupied Japan" |
| 2004-2005 | Lee Pennington | Columbia University | Ph.D. Candidate | "Wartorn Japan: Disabled Veterans and Society, 1931-1952" |
| 2003-2004 | Vera Mackie | Curtain University of Technology | Professor | "A Cultural History of the Body in Modern Japan" |
| 2003-2004 | Kenji Ito | Tokyo University | Postdoctoral Fellow | "Popular Perception of Science and Technology in Postwar Japan" |
| 2002-2003 | Helen Macnaughtan | London School of Economics | Postdoctoral Fellow | "Female Labor and the Allied Occupation of Japan" |
| 2002-2003 | Miho Matsugu | University of Chicago | Ph.D. Candidate | "Kawabata Yasunari's Snow Country as a National Narrative of the Occupation: 1945-1948" |
| 2002-2003 | Aaron Skabelund | Columbia University | Ph.D. Candidate | "Japan's Postwar Military, 1945-1989." |
| 2001-2002 | Sonia Ryang | Johns Hopkins University | Professor | "Japan's Emergence as an Anthropological Field" |
| 2001-2002 | Sayuri Shimizu | Michigan State University | Professor | "Japanese Baseball under U.S. Occupation, 1945-1952" |
| 2000-2001 | Michael Molasky | Connecticut College | Professor | "Reading Jazz in Postwar Japan" |
| 2000-2001 | Lori Watt | Columbia University | Ph.D. Candidate | "Post-World War Two Repatriation in Japan, 1945-1958" |
| 1999-2000 | Kristine Dennehy | UCLA | Ph.D. Candidate | "Memories of Colonial Korea in Postwar Japan" |
| 1999-2000 | Ben Dorfman | Australia National University | Ph.D. Candidate | "Local Religious Organizations in Postwar Japan" |
| 1999-2000 | Joanne Izbicki | Wake Forest University | Professor | "Orphans in Postwar Japan" |