Biography

Thomas Conlan

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. 

Curriculum Vitae

 

 

 

Multimedia Projects

 

Madarajima monjo
Suruga Date Collection
Tannowa
Mysteries of the Madarajima monjo
The Kyoto Princeton Project
Suruga Date Collection
The Kyoto Princeton Project 
Tannowa Collection
The Kyoto Princeton Project
   
Mongol Annotated
Japanese Documents (Komonjo)​Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of JapanAnnotated Mongol Scrolls website
   

Kishōmon: Four oaths and five invocations
Onin War

Scrolls of the Heiji Disturbance

Version of the Heiji Scrolls using Flash

Kishōmon: Four oaths and five invocationsThe Ōnin War: Visualizing 12 Years of
War in Japan, 1465-78
   
Thatch Roofer and Mayor in Meiji Japan
Pearl Harbor Bombing

 

Thatch Roofer and Mayor in Meiji JapanWW2 Japanese photos 
   

 

Monographs

1. Kings in All but Name: The Lost History of Ōuchi Rule in Japan 1350-1569
2. Samurai and the Warrior Culture of Japan: A Sourcebook, 471-1877
3. From Sovereign to Symbol: An Age of Ritual Determinism in Fourteenth Century Japan
4. State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth Century Japan
5. In Little Need of Divine Intervention: Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan
6. Samurai Warrior Weapons and Fighting Techniques
7. 図説 戦国時代 武器・防具・戦術百科
8. Weapons and Fighting Techniques of the Samurai Warrior 1200-1877