Mark Ravina
Mark Ravina is Professor of History at Emory University, and is a specialist in political economy in Edo period Japan, issues related to state-building, and digital humanities, among other subjects.
He earned his PhD at Stanford University in 1991. His first book, Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan, discusses state/national identity, autonomy, and political economy in the Edo period domains of Tokushima, Hirosaki, and Yonezawa. Ravina's second book, The Last Samurai, is a biography of Saigô Takamori; in recent years, he has begun focusing on topics relating to state-building in the Meiji period.
He has also appeared on CNN and the History Channel as an expert on Saigô Takamori, and other related subjects.
Publications
- "The Apocryphal Suicide of Saigō Takamori: Samurai, Seppuku and the Politics of Legend," Journal of Asian Studies 69:3 (2010), 691–721.
- "Kindaika, kindaisei to meikunzō no saikentō: Uesugi Yōzan o chūshin ni," Rekishi hyōron 717:1 (2010), 37-50.
- "Confucian banking: the community granary (shasō) in rhetoric and practice," in Bettina Gramlich-Oka and Gregory Smits (eds.), Economic thought in early modern Japan, Brill (2010), 179-204.
- “Japanese State Making in Global Context,” in Richard Boyd and Tak Wing Ngo (eds.), State Making in Asia, Routledge (2006), 31-46.
- “State-Making in Global Context: Japan in a World of Nation-States,” in Joshua Fogel (ed.), The Teleology of the Modern Nation-State, University of Pennsylvania Press (2005), 87-104.
- Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan, Stanford University Press, 1999.
- “State-Building and Political Economy in Early-Modern Japan,” The Journal of Asian Studies 54:4 (1995), 997–1022.