Dr Ian Rapley

Publication

• Date
• Type
• Promoted

Research

I am interested in a range of topics in modern Japanese and Asian history that are all broadly transnational in nature.

My first work concentrated on language in a transnational setting, arguing that the choice and development of languages used in international and transnational contexts is both revealing and important. Diplomatic missions, trade in the treaty ports, dissemination of scientific research, radical communist networks - all of these encounters and more besides were border crossing events which required the selection and use of a language to facilitate exchange and understanding. Whilst we often ignore the medium through which conversations and letter writing took place, in order to focus on the content of those meetings, examining more closesly language choice and language use brings additional insights into the nature of international encounters.

In 2019-20 I was the principal investigator on the AHRC/ESRC funded project The Japanese Scientist In Japan And In The World, which seeks to develop the history of Japanese science in a global context, examining the challenges faced by Japanese scientists in penetrating Western networks of scientific practice and in defining a position for themselves in Japanese society. My personal research seeks to look at the development of Japanese physics through the biography of two Nobel prize winners: Yukawa Hideki and Tomonaga Shinichiro.

Finally, I am also interested in travel and international encounters. This research focuses on the experiences of Western travellers to Japan in the late nineteenth and twentieth century and the role of informal encounters in shaping international relations between Japan and Western powers. By looking at travellers and travel writing, I am interested in the popular construction of ideas of Japan, the role of personal experience in this, and the ways in which these influenced more conventional international relations.

Teaching

I currently teach the following two year long stand-alone modules:

• The Search For an Asian Modern: 19th and 20th Century Japan (HS1768, U/Grad Year Two)
• Glimpses of the Unfamiliar: Travellers to Japan (HS1858, U/Grad Year Three)

I also teach on and convene the undergraduate year one Asian history module:

• Making Global Histories: Asia and the West (HS1108)

In prior years I have also lectured and taught seminars (and may do again!) on the following undergraduate modules:

• Making of the Modern World (HS1105)
• History in Practice (HS1107)
• Approaches to History

Supervisions

I currently have two research students:

• Michael Trull - a 'new diplomatic history' of Anglo-Japanese Relations (PhD)
• Alec Batty - Chaplains in the Far East during the Second World War (Mphil)