Japan on the Silk Road: Encounters and Perspectives of Politics and Culture in Eurasia

Lectures and Panels

Speaker: Selçuk Esenbel, Emerita Professor of Modern Japanese History in the Department of History, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey
Moderated by: Carol Gluck, George Sansom Professor of History, Columbia University

Dr. Esenbel will focus her talk on her recent book, Japan on the Silk Road. The book provides for the first time the historical background indispensable for understanding Japan’s current perspectives and policies in the vast area of Eurasia across the Middle East and Central Asia. Japanese diplomats, military officers, archaeologists, and linguists traversed the Silk Road, involving Japan in the Great Game and exploring ancient civilizations. The book exposes the entanglements of pre-war Japanese Pan-Asianism with Pan-Islamism, Turkic nationalism and Mongolian independence as a global history of imperialism. Japanese connections to Ottoman Turkey, India, Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, and China at the same time reveal a discrete global narrative of cosmopolitanism and transnationality.

About the speaker: Selçuk Esenbel is Emerita Professor of Modern Japanese History in the Department of History at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. Esenbel is currently teaching as emerita in the Department of History and the Master of Arts in Asian Studies at Bogazici University. She is also currently teaching in the History Department of Istanbul 29 Mayis University. Esenbel is the founder and presently the academic advisor of the Master of Arts in Asian Studies and the Asian Studies Center at Bogazici University.

After growing up in the United States, Turkey, and Japan, Esenbel completed her undergraduate degree in History at the International Christian University (Japan) and George Washington University (USA). She received her MS degree from the Department of Japanese Language and Linguistics at Georgetown University (USA) in 1969. Esenbel earned her Ph.D in Japanese History from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University where she also worked as a student assistant in the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. From 1982 to 1985, she was assistant professor at Boğaziçi University and became full professor in 1997, serving as Chair of the Department of History at Bogazici University between 1994 and 2003 during which time she expanded the History program to be the first one in Turkey with a world history perspective. She helped establish Turkey’s Japanese Studies Association in 1993 and became its third president in 2002. Esenbel is the recipient of the Imperial Order of the Rising Sun from Japan, Alexander von Humboldt Georg Forster Research Award, Fulbright Senior Scholar Award, and has been serving as a member of the International Advisory Board of Trustees of the Toynbee Prize Foundation.