Prof. Morgan Pitelka, Occidental College
Lecture
in SOS 250

Morgan Pitelka, a historian of late medieval and early modern Japan, will discuss his current re- search on Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616), the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate and an iconic figure in Japanese history. He will explain how material culture— in this case swords, art, and falcons— helps to complicate the top-down, hagiographic tendencies of biography. He will also address how this project fits into a planned series of studies on Japan’s long sixteenth century, which began with his previous book Handmade Culture (2005) and will continue in his next project, a study of daily life in the late medieval castle town of Ichijödani in old Echizen (today’s Fukui Prefecture).

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