Ian Jared Miller is a historian of modern Japan. His research is primarily concerned with imperialism and the cultural dimensions of scientific, medical, and environmental change. He earned his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2005, arriving at Harvard in 2007. He has been a postdoctoral fellow in the Expanding East Asian Studies Program (ExEAS) at Columbia's Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University.  His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the United States Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays), and the Japan Foundation.

Professor Miller's forthcoming book, The Nature of the Beasts (University of California Press, 2012), introduces readers to the cultural and environmental history of Tokyo's Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, Japan's first zoo, opened in 1882. The zoo was a microcosm of changing attitudes towards empire and the natural world in modern Japan.  His current book project, Renaturing Tokyo, recasts the twentieth-century development of the Japanese capital—the world’s largest city—in the frame of environmental history.  He is also working with Professors Brett L. Walker and Julia Adeney Thomas on a collection of interdisciplinary essays on Japan’s vexed environmental experience, provisionally titled Japan at Nature’s Horizon.  Other research and teaching interests include the global history of natural disasters (especially tsunami), comparative imperialisms, philosophies of action and agency, digital humanities, and the interdisciplinary study of embodiment, disease, and especially public health.

In addition to working with graduate students in the History Department, Professor Miller is also a member of the Standing Committee on History and East Asian Languages (HEAL). The HEAL program is designed to accommodate the particular needs of Ph.D. students who desire a more language-intensive program of study of East Asian history.  He is involved in a number of interdisciplinary initiatives on campus, notably the Energy History Project sponsored by the Joint Center for History and Economics and the MIT Research Group on History, Energy, and Environment.

Selected Publications

• The Nature of the Beasts:  Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute | University of California Press, forthcoming in 2012)
• “Bitter Legacy, Injured Coast,” New York Times, March 19, 2011
• "Didactic Nature: Exhibiting Nation and Empire at the Ueno Zoological Gardens" in JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan's Animal Life Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan (2005)

Contact Info

Center for Government and International Studies-South Building

Room S421

1730 Cambridge Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

ian _miller@harvard.edu

617.384.7494

 

Office Hours: Thursday 10:00-12:00

Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies

HEAL Program

Energy History Project