Andrew Gordon is the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University. He is a leading historian of labor and the Japanese economy, subjects he approaches engagingly by focusing on specific consumer items and companies. He writes through the lens of social history, rather

than only through numbers and statistics. He also writes more generally about Japan and has authored the leading textbook on modern Japanese history, A Modern History of Japan. Professor Gordon has even published on Japanese baseball players in the US. His new project is a history of Japan’s lost decades, the twenty year recession that Japan is still struggling to overcome.

A Special Thanks:The School of International Letters & Cultures is grateful to Robert C. Staley, B.A. Asian Studies, Monmouth College, for his generous support of this lecture and visiting professorship at Arizona State University.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Reception to follow the lecture.

Visitor parking is available in the University Club and the Fulton Center parking lots.

A lecture presented by the 2016 Robert C. Staley Distinguished Visiting Professor in East Asian Studies

Andrew GordonLee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University

The Afterlife of Empire: The Politics of Memory in East Asia4:30 – 6:00 pm | Thursday, January 21, 2016University Club Heritage Room | ASU Tempe

Past Robert C. Staley Distinguished Visiting Professors in East Asian Studies

2015 Michel Hockx, University of London, Internet Literature in China

2014 Nicola Di Cosmo, Princeton University, Climate Change and the Rise of the Mongols: New Answers to Old Problem

2013 David R. McCann, Harvard University, Particle or Wave: Korean Poetry in Global Circulations

2012 Mark Sidel, University of Wisconsin, Negotiating the Nimble Leninist State: Vietnam and China’s Fragile Nongovernmental Organizations and the Governments They Face

2011 Elizabeth Berry, UC Berkeley, The Virtue of Wealth and the Ethics of Consumption in the Age of the Tokugawa Shogun

2009 John Duncan, UCLA, History Wars in East Asia: The Politics of the Past

2008 Peter Perdue, Harvard University, China and Other Colonial Empires

2007 Richard Baum, UCLA, China: The Limits of Authoritarian Resilience

2005 Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago, North Korea in the “Axis of Evil”

2004 John Dower, MIT, Facing ‘East,’ Facing ‘West’: Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan

An academic unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences