2026 Distinguished Annual Lecture: Jordan Sand

The fourth annual MJHA Distinguished Annual Lecture, on a topic TBA, will be given in October 2026 by Jordan Sand, Professor of Japanese History, Georgetown University.

The Stuff of Japanese History: Materialist Approaches

Digitization is altering how people apprehend lived reality. Historians can respond by producing work that is physically located, embodied, and material. Modern Japan provides unusually fertile ground for such materialist approaches. Using examples of four methods of learning from things — “unintentional witnessing,” “thing theory,” “thermodynamics,” and “object-oriented ontology” — this presentation will illustrate the insights to be gained from studying the “stuff” of Japanese history.