Prof. Ketelaar has retired and no longer directs BA theses or accepts new graduate students.
University of Chicago, PhD '87
BIOGRAPHY
Professor Ketelaar has lived in Japan off and on for fifteen of the last thirty-five years, mostly in Kyoto, but also in Tokyo, Hokkaidô (mostly during the summer), and Kyûshû (mostly during the winter). He did some of his undergraduate work at Waseda University and some of his graduate and dissertation work at Kyoto University.
He has taught in Japan as a study-trip leader for the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Chicago Alumni Association. He was an undergraduate educator for the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies (KCJS) on three separate occasions, and in 2012, he led a group of University of Chicago undergraduates to Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka after a month studying Japanese history and culture with them at the university's Center in Beijing.
Professor Ketelaar was a member of the KCJS Governing Board for fifteen years and currently serves as the chair of the Executive Committee and the Governing Board of the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (IUC) based in Yokohama, Japan.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
Professor Ketelaar is currently finishing a book on the importance of the barbarian and the frontier in the construction of Japanese national identity and national history: Ezo: A History of Japan's Eastern Frontier (Princeton, forthcoming). He is also beginning a book project on the roles and meanings of emotion in the construction of the historical imagination in Japan. Topics such as the relationships between the creator deities Izanagi and Izanami or between Minamoto no Yoshitsune and his retainer Musashi Bô Benkei are read as means to describe the intersection of literary and historical imaginations as well as means towards the end of writing a history of emotion in Japan.
(co-authored with Peter Nosco) "Introduction: Values, Identity, and Equality in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Japan." In Values, Identity, and Equality in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Japan, edited by James E. Ketelaar, Yasunori Kojima, and Peter Nosco, 1–26. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
Japanese translation with a new chapter: "For the Japanese Reader." Edo no naka no Nihon, Nihon no naka no Edo: Kachikan, Aidenteitei, Byoudou no shiten kara [Edo’s Japan, Japan’s Edo: From the Perspectives of Values, Identity and Equality], edited by James E. Ketelaar, Yasunori Kojima, and Peter Nosco. Tokyo: Kashima. 2016.
Jakyô, Junkyô no Meiji: Haibutsu kishaku to kindai Bukkyô. Tokyo: Pelikan, 2006. A substantially revised version of Heretics and Martyrs in Japanese with a new introduction.
Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Winner of the Hans Rosenhaupt Memorial Award.
University of California, Berkeley, PhD '10
BIOGRAPHY
I specialize in the history of modern Russia and the Soviet Union, with a particular interest in Soviet culture, society, and their international context. Currently, I am at work on two book projects.
The first, Weary Sun, explores the history of tango, its creators and audiences, in Stalinist Russia and Eastern Europe. Soviet tango was made in Riga and Warsaw. Struck by the connections and exchanges between Soviet and émigré cultures, I focus on the largely unexamined Russian-speaking communities at the borders of the Soviet Union. Tango occupied a central place in the Soviet aural world, yet it fits uncomfortably in the dominant narratives and thus calls for a rethinking of Stalinist culture. This research reconstructs the sounds of Soviet courtyards, communal apartments, southern resorts, movie theaters, and parks of "rest and culture," where people encountered the tango most frequently. I seek to explain tango’s aesthetic and ideological work among other representations of socialist paradise.
Another project, The Entangled Histories of Soviet Newspeak and the Russian Language in the Twentieth Century, describes the rise and fall of Soviet newspeak as a language intricately bound to the daily uses and reforms of Russian itself. I see the Russian language as a field for defining social status and cultural authority in a post-revolutionary world. Multiple players were active in this field, including ordinary speakers of Russian and writers who experimented with the vernacular.
My first book, To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture (Harvard, 2018), is a history of the Soviet opening to the West during the 1950s and 1960s. The book investigates why and how Western cultural imports arrived in the Soviet Union on an unprecedented scale, as well as what meanings they acquired for Soviet audiences. To See Paris and Die brings together the ideas that justified cultural exchange and the diplomatic negotiations that made it possible, the secrets of museum storage rooms and the publicity of radio broadcasts, lavish international film festivals and backwater countryside screenings, enormous print runs and home-made books, state-sponsored travel and emigration. Analyzing how the Soviets received Western novels, paintings, and films, the book takes translation as its central theme — a mechanism of cultural transfer, a method of habituation of foreign imports, and a metaphor for transnational interactions. When they first appeared en masse, Western imports were extraordinary, but in the process of cross-cultural transfer that began in the mid-1950s, the foreign became quotidian—an indiscernible part of late Soviet culture and daily life.
My research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kennan Institute, the American Philosophical Society, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Social Science Research Council, American Councils for International Education, the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Foundation, and the Fulbright-Hays program, among others.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
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Best Book in Cultural Studies Prize, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, 2019
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Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies, Nanovic Institute, University of Notre Dame, 2020
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Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2019
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Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2019
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Honorable Mention, Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language Association, 2019
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Shortlist, Council for European Studies Book Award, 2020
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Shortlist, Best First Book Prize, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, 2019
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Shortlist, Pushkin House Russian Book Prize, Pushkin House, London, 2019
The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s, edited by Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.
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"Seminal Years and the Long Arc of the Moral Universe [review essay]." Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 20, no. 3 (Summer 2019), 613-626.
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"The Thaw as an Event in Russian History [coauthored with Denis Kozlov]." In The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s, edited by Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd, 18–81. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.
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"The Revival of Soviet Internationalism in the 1950s." In The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s, edited by Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd, 262–401. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.
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"Picasso in Thaw Culture." Cahiers du monde russe 47, no. 1–2 (Jan.–July 2006): 65–108
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"Books and Borders: Sergei Obraztsov and Soviet Travels to London in the 1950s." In Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist Under Capitalism and Socialism, edited by Anne Gorsuch and Diane Koenker, 227–47. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Published To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture (Harvard, 2018)
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Wins ASEEES's Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize and Marshall Shulman Book Prize
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Rachel Polonsky, "When the Soviets Shimmied," New York Review of Books, Aug. 15, 2019.
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Michele A. Berdy, "Gilburd Reveals Second Lives Behind the Iron Curtain," Moscow Times, May 25, 2019.
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Jennifer Wilson, "How to Think Freely," New Republic, May 9, 2019.
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Pushkin House 2019 Russian Book Prize (shortlist)
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Harry Robertson, Book Review, Financial Times, Dec. 14, 2018.
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Interview with Anna Chernyakhovskaya, Higher School of Economics, National Research University, Moscow, Apr. 4, 2018.
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Interview with Alexander Kan, BBC Russian Service, June 8, 2019
Yale University, PhD '20
BIOGRAPHY
Thuto Thipe is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of History. Her research focuses on social and legal history of 19th and 20th century South Africa. Her manuscript in progress, Black Freehold: Landownership in Alexandra Township, tells the story of the history of land ownership in Alexandra Township, near Johannesburg, from its founding in 1912 to 1979 when the state had stripped black land owners of their freehold land ownership and forced removals had largely displaced Alexandra residents. It moves from the examination of individual buildings and yards to a structural analysis of the Township and its development to show how different elements of land ownership rights combined to produce a dynamic, black-controlled Township that was at odds with colonists’ view of black people’s social and political place in South African society. The disruption that black people’s freehold land ownership in Alexandra caused to white supremacist order drove the South African state to invest enormous financial resources and political capital in dismantling black freehold rights, physically demolishing large parts of the Township, and forcibly moving tens of thousands of people from Alexandra in efforts to destroy the social realities that residents produced under freehold.
She holds a PhD in History and African American Studies from Yale University, Masters in Gender Studies from the University of Cape Town, where she also held positions as a lecturer and researcher, and BA from Macalester College.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
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“Photographing Home Life in Alexandra between the 1930s and 1970s,” in Foundational African Writers: Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi, Es’kia Mphahlele. Eds. Bhekizizwe Peterson, Khwezi Mkhize and Makhosazana Xaba. University of the Witwatersrand Press, 2022.
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“Land and reparation politics and policy after apartheid,” in The Oxford Handbook of South African History Ed. Daniel Magaziner. Oxford University Press, 2020.
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With de Souza, Monica and Luwaya, Nolundi. “‘The Advert Was Put Up Yesterday’: Public Participation in the Traditional Courts Bill Legislative Process.” New York Law Review 60(2) (2015/2016): 431-463.
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“The Boundaries of Tradition: An examination of the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act.” Harvard Human Rights Journal, Online Symposium (2014).
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“Defining Boundaries: Gender and Property Rights in South Africa’s Traditional Courts Bill.” Laws 2(4) (2013): 483-511.
Brown University, Ph'D 02
BIOGRAPHY
I am an historian of modern US politics broadly construed, with special interests in the mutual constitution of social categories, democratic publics, and state formation.
My first book, Warfare State, is a history of the social politics of the national state as its foundations shifted from welfare to warfare during World War II. Its central concern is to examine the ways in which different groups of citizens encountered the burgeoning warfare state and in the process accepted, rejected, or otherwise contested the legitimacy of expanding federal authority in everyday life, thereby shaping the horizons of political possibility for decades.
I am currently completing a sequel to Warfare State tentatively titled Sovereign Discipline: The American Extraterritorial State in the Atomic Age. This book examines the mass politics of extraterritorial sovereignty, and the crisis of legitimacy it engendered, from V-E Day to the Cuban Missile Crisis. My third book project is also nearing completion. It is an intellectual history titled New Leviathan: Rethinking Sovereignty and Political Agency after Total War.
Much of this recent work is informed by a long-term collaborative research project on the problem of the democratic state, which has benefitted from two Neubauer Collegium project grants for which I am codirector ("The State as History and Theory" and "The Problem of the Democratic State in US History"), and resulted in the edited collection Boundaries of the State in US History as well as two special issues of the Tocqueville Review.
My teaching interests include both graduate and undergraduate courses on the history of US politics, diplomacy, and war; social engineering; social movements; citizenship; America in the world; the American state; and a set of undergraduate research seminars on the history of the New Deal, the early Cold War, and digital history. I am also committed to teaching in Chicago's distinctive Core Curriculum. It is one of the oldest general education curricula in the United States, engaging foundational works and questions in the humanistic social sciences for decades since the 1930s.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
- Honorable mention, 2012 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians.
- Review by Walter Russell Mead in Foreign Affairs (March/April 2012).
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Boundaries of the State in US History, edited by James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
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"Beyond Stateless Democracy," edited by William J. Novak, Stephen W. Sawyer, and James T. Sparrow, special issue, Tocqueville Review 36, no. 1 (2015).
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"The History of the French and American States," edited by Stephen W. Sawyer, William J. Novak, and James T. Sparrow, special issue, Tocqueville Review 33, no. 2 (2012).
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"Democratic States of Un-Exception: Towards a New Genealogy of the American Political," coauthored with William J. Novak and Stephen W. Sawyer. In Many Hands of the State, edited by Kimberly Morgan and Ann Orloff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press.
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"Rumors of Empire: Tracking the Image of Britain at the Dawn of the American Century." In Boundaries of the State in US History, edited by James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
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"Introduction," coauthored with William J. Novak and Stephen W. Sawyer. In Boundaries of the State in US History, edited by James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
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"Morgenthau's Dilemma: Rethinking the Democratic Leviathan in the Atomic Age." In "Beyond Stateless Democracy, edited by William J. Novak, Stephen W. Sawyer, and James T. Sparrow, special issue, Tocqueville Review 36, no. 1 (2015).
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"Beyond Stateless Democracy," coauthored with William J. Novak and Stephen W. Sawyer, In "Beyond Stateless Democracy, special issue, Tocqueville Review 36, no. 1 (2015).
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"Behind the Atomic Curtain: School Desegregation and Territoriality in the Early Cold War." In "The History of the French and American States, edited by Stephen W. Sawyer, William J. Novak, and James T. Sparrow, special edition, Tocqueville Review 33, no. 2 (2012): 115–139.
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"Toward a History of the Democratic State," coauthored with William J. Novak and Stephen W. Sawyer. In "The History of the French and American States, special edition, Tocqueville Review 33, no. 2 (2012): 7–18.
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"Freedom to Want: The Federal Government and Politicized Consumption in World War II." In Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement, edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Stephen Tuck. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
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"A Nation in Motion: Norfolk, the Pentagon, and the Nationalization of the Metropolitan South, 1941–1953." In The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, edited by Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
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"'Buying Our Boys Back': The Mass Foundations of Fiscal Citizenship in World War II." Journal of Policy History 20, no. 2 (2008): 263–86.
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"Hot War, Cold War: The Structures of Sociological Action, 1940–1955," coauthored with Andrew Abbott. In Sociology in America: The American Sociological Association Centennial History, edited by Craig Calhoun. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
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Awarded 2023 Quantrell Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching
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Named an OAH Distinguished Lecturer
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Co-organizes Major Project on "State as History and Theory" at the Neubauer Collegium