Dr. David Ambaras – a New Book and a European Lecture Series

In March, Associate Professor David Ambaras traveled to Europe to give a series of invited lectures on his recently published book Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Ambaras spoke at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. While in Paris, Ambaras helped lead a workshop to advise early-career French scholars on publishing in English-language Japanese Studies journals.

Japan’s Imperial Underworlds excavates long-forgotten histories of child trafficking, marriage migration, travel and adventure writing, and piracy in the spaces between Japan and China from the 1860s to the 1930s. Ambaras argues that transgressive intimacies between Japanese and Chinese fundamentally shaped the territorial borders and imaginative geographies that defined Japan’s imperial world and continue to inform present-day views of China.

Ambaras also spoke about Japan’s Imperial Underworlds on a recent Meiji at 150 podcast, and in an author Q&A for the Weatherhead East Asia Institute.

You can learn more about Dr. David Ambaras HERE.