David Ambaras
Associate Professor
Ph. D., Princeton University 1999
M. A., Princeton University 1995
M. A., The University of Tokyo 1991
License, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales 1986
B. A., Columbia University 1984
460 Withers Hall
Phone: (919) 513-2228
Email: david_ambaras@ncsu.edu
skype: dambaras
FALL 09 OFFICE HOURS:
T 3:00-4:00, H 11:00-12:00, and by appointment
Research Interests
Professor Ambaras' research has focused on social problems and urban social history in imperial Japan. His first book, Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2006), shows how the policing of urban youth constituted a central arena for the development of new state structures and new forms of disciplinary power, the articulation of new class, gender, and family relations, and the regulation of popular culture during the years 1895 to 1945. His current book-length project, Down and Out From Taipei to Dairen: Settler Anxiety and the Limits of Japanese Colonialism, examines the vulnerabilities that accompanied Japanese movement into colonial space and the limits and unintended effects of Japanese efforts to police the boundaries of ethnicity and class in the colonies. He is also working on a study of infanticide in prewar Tokyo that highlights the city's shifting geographies of gender and class as well as the development of new modes of perceiving urban life; and is planning a project on cinema and the city in modern Japan.
Other Publications
- "Social Knowledge, Cultural Capital, and the New Middle Class in Modern Japan, 1895-1912." The Journal of Japanese Studies 24, no. 1 (1998): 1-33.
- "Juvenile Delinquency and the National Defense State: Policing Young Workers in Wartime Japan, 1937-1945." The Journal of Asian Studies 63, no. 1 (2004): 31-60.
- "Topographies of Distress: Tokyo, c. 1930." in Noir Urbanisms, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton University Press, forthcoming)
Teaching Interests
In addition to teaching introductory surveys of Asian and world history, Professor Ambaras teaches upper level courses on modern Japan, Japanese imperialism, and Western missionaries in East Asia. He is also planning to develop courses on migrations and urbanization in Asia, and looks forward to helping expand the department's offerings in world history.
