People

Laura Hein

Japan in the 20th century

Office: 1800 Sherman #507
Phone: 847-491-3408
E-mail: l-heinnorthwestern.edu

Laura E. Hein (PhD Wisconsin, 1986) specializes in the history of Japan in the 20th century and its international relations.

Much of Laura Hein's work focuses on debates over economic policy and the implications of various economic theories. Reasonable Men, Powerful Words: Political Culture and Expertise in Twentieth Century Japan (University of California, Fall 2004) explores various ways in which economic expertise intersected with politics through a study of the lives of a tight-knit group of Japanese intellectuals. It was published in Japanese as 理性ある人びと　力ある言葉 ―― 大内兵衛グループの思想と行動 ――. She also publishes on economic policy and the ideology of economic growth in postwar Japan, particularly Fueling Growth: The Energy Revolution and Economic Policy in Postwar Japan. (1990) which began life as a dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

She also has a strong interest in problems of remembrance and public memory, resulting in three co-edited books with Mark Selden: Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (1997), Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States (2000), and Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to American and Japanese Power (2003). The University of Michigan is about to release another volume, Imagination Without Borders: Feminist Artist Tomiyama Taeko and Social Responsibility, which will be accompanied by a website created by the Academic Technology Group at Northwestern University.

She regularly offers a graduate seminar on Commemoration as a Historical Problem and has recently developed another, Asia as Point of Departure: Offsetting the West.

Curriculum Vitae

Additional Information

History of Japanese Economic Thought and Policy

For more on Reasonable Men, Powerful Words, see
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10214.html

For an on-line review of this book:
http://search.japantimes.co.jp...

Remembrance

For more information on Living with the Bomb, see
http://www.mesharpe.com...

For more information on Censoring History, see
http://www.mesharpe.com...
see electronic reviews of this book at
http://www.h-net.org...
Also Richard Rothstein's NYT review posted at
http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/webfeat_lessons20011107

For more information on Islands of Discontent, see book
http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com...
See on-line review at http://www.uchinanchu.org...

For a nice K-12 curriculum featuring this book, see
http://www.exeas.org/resources/okinawa.html

Other Professional Activities

Laura Hein is a coordinator of the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus , a peer-reviewed electronic journal and archive affiliated with Z-Net and Z magazine that chronicles Japan and the Asia-Pacific in global perspective, encompassing politics, economics, society, history, culture, international relations, war and peace, and historical memory. In addition to Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus exclusives, it presents translations from Japanese and other languages as well as reprints of important texts. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus draws on the writings of researchers, journalists, policy analysts and writers throughout Asia and the Pacific, North America, Europe and Australia. Its fully indexed website provides a permanent resource for researchers on the Asia-Pacific. Subscribers receive a weekly mailing announcing and introducing four to eight new articles.
http://www.japanfocus.org/

Four of her own essays appear there, one of which is among the top ten all-time hits on the site:

  1. Laura Hein, Remembrance of World War II and the Postwar in the United States and Japan
  2. Laura Hein, Citizens, Foreigners, and the State in the United States and Japan since 9/11
  3. Laura Hein and Akiko Takenaka, Exhibiting World War II in Japan and the United States
  4. Laura Hein, The Cultural Career of the Japanese Economy: Developmental and Cultural Nationalisms in Historical Perspective

She also serves on the editorial board of Critical Asian Studies, an inter-area, interdisciplinary journal, and was its Northeast Asia editor for a decade.
http://www.bcasnet.org/