Biography

Thomas Conlan, Professor of East Asian Studies and History, is interested in the political, social and intellectual transformations of Japan from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries. Majoring in Japanese and History at the University of Michigan, he attended graduate school at Stanford University. Professor Conlan’s first published work, In Little Need of Divine Intervention: Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan, introduced an important picture scroll depicting the Mongol invasions of Japan. His next monograph, State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth Century Japan, based on his Ph.D. dissertation, revealed how warfare transformed the social, political, and intellectual matrix of fourteenth-century Japan. He then wrote a general history of the samurai, entitled Weapons and Fighting Techniques of the Samurai Warrior, 1200-1877, which was revised and reprinted as Samurai Warrior Weapons and Fighting Techniques. He also completed a translation of Samurai and the Warrior Culture of Japan: A Sourcebook 471-1877. In his From Sovereign to Symbol: An Age of Ritual Determinism in Fourteenth Century Japan, Professor Conlan analyzed the nature of political thought in medieval Japan. Finally in his most recent monograph, Kings in All but Name: The Lost History of Ōuchi Rule in Japan 1350-1569 (Oxford, 2024), Conlan provides a new understanding of premodern Japanese history, showing that it was a multiethnic state, economically based on mining and trade.


Mysteries of the Madarajima monjo The Kyoto Princeton Project	Suruga Date Collection The Kyoto Princeton Project	Tannowa Collection The Kyoto Princeton Project


Japanese Documents (Komonjo)	Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan	Annotated Mongol Scrolls website


Scrolls of the Heiji Disturbance Version of the Heiji Scrolls using Flash	Kishōmon: Four oaths and five invocations	The Ōnin War: Visualizing 12 Years of War in Japan, 1465-78


Thatch Roofer and Mayor in Meiji Japan	WW2 Japanese photos