Susan L. Burns

Associate Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations

The Department of History

The University of Chicago

1126 East 59^th Street

Chicago, IL 60637

Office: Social Science 221

Telephone : 773-702-8934

Fax: 773-702-750

E-mail: slburns@uchicago.edu

Research and Teaching Interests

• Early modern and modern intellectual history
• History of medicine and the body
• Gender and sexuality
• Gender, law, and medicine

Biography

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1994. In 2002, I returned to the University as a faculty member after teaching at the University of Texas at Austin for almost ten years. My work focuses on Japan’s long nineteenth century, the period from the late Tokugawa period to the end of Meiji. My first book, Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (Duke, 2003), explores the Kokugaku discourse of the late Tokugawa period. and examines how nativist scholars used their analysis of ancient texts to produce multiple understandings of “Japan.” My second project, still in progress, explores the medical culture of the nineteenth century and analyzes the impact of the rise of "Western medicine" and “public health” upon conceptions of the body and subjecthood in Meiji Japan. Recently, I have turned to explore the intersection of medical and legal discourse in the formation of modern conceptions of gender. In a series of conference papers, I have taken up issues such as abortion, sexual violence, and the formation of “family law.”

Recent Publications

Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (Duke University Press, 2003).

“Marketing Health and the Modern Body: Patent Medicine Advertisements in Meiji-Taisho Japan,” forthcoming in Hans Thomsen and Jennifer Purtle, eds.., East Asian Visual Culture from the Treaty Ports to World War II (New York: Paragon Publishers, 2006).

Guest Editor, Special Issue on “Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Context of Modernity,” US-Japan Women’s Journal no. 24 (Winter 2003)

“From ‘Leper Villages’ to Leprosaria: Public Health, Medicine, and the Culture of Exclusion in Modern Japan,” in Alison Bashford and Carolyn. Isolation: Policies and Practices of Exclusion (Routledge, 2003).

“Making Illness Identity: Writing ‘Leprosy Literature’ in Modern Japan.” Japan Review no. 16 (2003).

“The Body as Text: Confucianism, Reproduction, and Gender in Early Modern Japan.” In Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, edited by Benjamin Elman, Herman Ooms, and John Duncan (Los Angeles: UCLA Asia Pacific Monograph Series, 2002).

“Constructing the National Body: Public Health and the Nation in Meiji Japan.” In Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities, edited by Timothy Brook and André Schmid, 17-50. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

“Bodies and Borders: Syphilis, Prostitution, and the Nation in Nineteenth Century Japan.” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, no. 15 (December 1998): 3-30.

“Contemplating Places: The Hospital as Modern Experience in Meiji Japan.” In New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan, edited by Helen Hardacre and Adam L. Kern, 702-718. Leiden: E. J. Brill Publishers, 1997.

Work in Progress

The Body in Question: The Politics and Culture of Medicine in Nineteenth Century Japan (book-length study of the transformation of medical culture in the nineteenth century)

“When Abortion Became a Crime: Abortion and the Law in Meiji Japan,”currently under revision.

“Defining Rape: Gender, the Law, and the Courts in Meiji Japan” (article in preparation)

Society and Culture in Japan: A Source Book (co-edited with Sally Hastings, contracted with Bedford Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2000).

Service to the Profession

Member, Northeast Asia Council, Association for Asian Studies

Member, Japan Advisory Board, Social Science Research Council

Teaching and Advising

Faculty Advisor, Literary and Cultural History of Early Modern East Asia Workshop

Faculty Advisor, East Asia: Transregional Histories

Courses 2005-2006

East Asian Civilization—Japan (Winter 2006)

Early Modern Japan (Winter 2006)

Graduate Colloquium: Meiji Culture (Spring 2006)

Nineteenth Century Encounters: Japan and the West (Spring 2006)

Graduate Studies on Japan at the University of Chicago

Department of History

Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Center for East Asian Studies

East Asian Collection of Regenstein Library