Miriam Kingsberg Kadia

Affiliated Faculty are not employees of the Center for Asian Studies. Please contact this faculty member at their home department.

Education

Ph.D., History, University of California Berkeley, 2009
Certificate, Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies Ten-Month Program, 2007
Certificate,Inter-University Program in Mandarin, 2005
B.A/M.A., Brandeis University, 2003

Regional and Thematic Interests

Social and cultural history of 20th-century Japan and East Asia

Profile

Professor Kadia teaches courses on Japanese history, focusing on the modern and postwar periods. Some of the courses she offers include: "Introduction to Japanese History," "Postwar Japan Since 1945," "Militarism in Japanese History," and "Japanese Diasporas in Asia and the Americas." At the graduate level, she teaches seminars on East Asia and global history.

Her first book, Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History (University of California Press, 2014), won the Eugene V. Kayden Book Award. Her second book, Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan, was published by Stanford University Press in Fall 2019. Her new book project explores time accounting and time use in the twentieth century. In recent years, Dr. Kadia has held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the ACLS, and Harvard University. Her work has appeared in the Journal for Asian Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Monumenta Nipponica, the Journal of Japanese Studies, Modern Asian Studies, and other journals.

Selected Publications

April 2015. "Repatriation But Not 'Return': A Japanese Brazilian Dekasegi Goes Back to Brazil," Japan Focus.

2014. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

2013. “Methamphetamine Solution: Drugs and the Reconstruction of Nation in Postwar Japan.” Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 76 No. 1: 1-22.

2012 “Legitimating Empire, Legitimating Nation: The Scientific Study of Opium Addiction in Japanese Manchuria.” Journal of Japanese Studies Vol. 38 No. 2: 329-355.