Syllabus (Spring 2025)

Thomas Conlan, Professor of East Asian Studies and History, studies Japan’s political, social, and intellectual transformations from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. A University of Michigan graduate and Stanford graduate, he published In Little Need of Divine Intervention: Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan, introducing a crucial picture scroll depicting the invasions. His monograph, State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth Century Japan, revealed how warfare transformed Japan. He also wrote a general history of the samurai, Weapons and Fighting Techniques of the Samurai Warrior, 1200-1877, later revised and reprinted as Samurai Warrior Weapons and Fighting Techniques. Conlan translated Samurai and the Warrior Culture of Japan: A Sourcebook 471-1877. In From Sovereign to Symbol: An Age of Ritual Determinism in Fourteenth Century Japan, he analyzed medieval Japanese political thought. His most recent monograph, Kings in All but Name: The Lost History of Ōuchi Rule in Japan 1350-1569 (Oxford, 2024), offers a new understanding of premodern Japanese history as a multiethnic state economically based on mining and trade.