JapanLab Postdoctoral Fellows for 2023-24

Megan Gilbert

Megan Gilbert is a JapanLab post-doctoral fellow in the Department of History. Her book project Conciliators and Fixed Points: Dispute Resolution in Fifteenth-Century Japan examines methods of negotiation and community sanction within the lovingly-preserved wreckage of inherited institutions. She completed her PhD in Japanese history at Princeton University in 2022, where she helped inaugurate the Komonjo (Documents) site, transcribing and translating medieval Japanese documents. She will lead a set of interconnected digital projects that seek to make sense of the upheavals of fifteenth and sixteenth-century Japan. These will use a variety of tools to bring to life how armed conflict and all the rest of life— from family structure to trading patterns to religious organization— wove together and shaped each other.

Colton Runyan

Colton Runyan is a JapanLab postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Asian Studies. His research concerns the political, social, and economic impact of organized physical competitions at the Heian court during the Heian period. His first book project entitled The Power of a Tourney: Physical Competitions in Heian Japan challenges multiple predominant perceptions of Heian courtiers and explores a topic rarely discussed in anglophone or Japanese scholarship. His academic interests extend to all Japanese forms of sport, games, and play, including video games. He is excited to work with UT students as they engage with Japanese culture across physical and digital mediums. 

JapanLab Postdoctoral Fellows for 2022-23

 

Jessa Dahl

Jessa Dahl was a JapanLab postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Asian Studies for 2022-23. Her research is focused on the intersection of colonial power and transnational exchange in nineteenth-century Japanese treaty ports. As a historian of treaty ports, she is also a historian of gender, empire, race, transnational community, and urban space. Her first book project is focused on the treaty port city of Nagasaki, tracing the development of transnational landscapes across the city's uneven fortunes in the late nineteenth century. She is excited to explore these themes in projects developed with students via spatial and open-source publishing programs like StoryMaps JS, QGIS, and Omeka. Using new digital tools, these projects will take primary sources like a travel-themed board game from 1872 and make them accessible and engaging to a modern audience. Dr Dahl is now an Assistant Professor at Knox College.