Richard Reitan (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2002) is an associate professor of history at Franklin & Marshall College, Pennsylvania, USA. His field of research, broadly, is the cultural, material, and intellectual history of modern Japan. He has published on themes of ethics, gender, neoliberalism, and environmental theory, and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo's Center for Philosophy and, more recently, at the Berlin Workshop in Institutional Analysis of Social-Ecological Systems (WINS) at Humboldt University. His current work, dealing with environmental theory and critical eco-pedagogy, centers on the problem of the social reproduction of the environmental crisis and ways of theorizing eco-historical change. To this end, he is investigating the "forest aesthetics" movement in early twentieth-century Japan, a non-viable means to address today's environmental crisis yet one that nevertheless serves as a key resource in present-day Japanese reactionary ecological theory and, indirectly, in Euro-American environmental philosophy. He is interested in how the themes of value, time, and holism, which run throughout Japan's early twentieth-century forest aesthetics discourse, might be re-envisioned as part of an alternative theory of eco-historical change.
RCC Research Project: Value, Time, and Holism: Forest Aesthetics & Capitalism in Early 20th c. Japan
Selected Publications:
- The Fears of the Aesthetic Community: Interiority and Capitalist Modernity in Japan (under review).
- Making a Moral Society: Ethics and the State in Meiji Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2010.
- "Teaching China's Global Environmental Crisis: Exploring Forms of Eco-Critical Pedagogy." (under review).
- "Ecology and Japanese History: Reactionary Environmentalism's Troubled Relationship with the Past," The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 15, Issue 3, no. 1 (Feb 2017).
- "Narratives of Equivalence: Neoliberalism in Contemporary Japan," Radical History Review 112 (2012): 43-64.
- "Völkerpsychologie and the Appropriation of 'Spirit' in Meiji Japan," Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 3 (2010): 495-522.