Birthday

0001-01-01

Place of Birth

Biography

Professor, University of Texas, Austin Dr. Mark Ravina's specialty is Japanese history, especially eighteenth and nineteenth-century politics, but his broader methodological interest is in the transnational and international dimension of state-building. His third book, To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration as World History was published in 2017 by Oxford University Press and won the best book prize of the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. Beginning 2023, He is director of the UT Institute for Historical Studies Much of his current research and teaching focuses on digital humanities. By study of digital mapping and the history of cartography recently appeared in the Journal of Cultural Analytics. He is a co-PI for JapanLab, a research-teaching initiative focusing on the creation of digital content for Japanese Studies. For Spring 2023, his undergraduate team is digitizing a Japanese board game (sugoroku 双六) from 1938 focusing on the invasion of China (支那事変). The challenge: how to convey, but not endorse, the power of commercial propaganda. In public scholarship, he recently completed a 12-part audio-video course, The Rise of Modern Japan, for Wondrium. That follows on my 24-part course, Understanding Japan, which was co-produced with the Smithsonian Institution Dr. Ravina's earlier research includes a biography of Saigō Takamori, The Last Samurai (John Wiley & Sons, 2004). Saigō was the inspiration for the character Katsumoto in the Tom Cruise film, also entitled The Last Samurai. He had begun working on the book without any knowledge of the movie, but the Warner Brothers film sparked a surge in general interest on Saigō. He appeared as a "guest expert" on CNN and on two History Channel programs: "History vs. Hollywood" and "The Samurai."The Last Samurai has been translated into Chinese, Russian, and Polish. Dr. Ravina's first book was Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan (Stanford, 1999), also published in Japanese translation as Meikun no satetsu 名君の蹉跌 (NTT shuppan 2004).