Seth Jacobowitz wins the 2017 International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize in the Humanities

In July 2017, Professor Seth Jacobowitz’s Writing Technology in Meiji Japan was awarded the 2017 International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize in the Humanities at the ICAS biannual conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand. His book was chosen from a field of 93 book submissions from across all the regions and humanistic disciplines of Asian Studies.

ICAS Book Prize (IBP) in the Humanities statement published in the book prize announcement at the conference:

Superbly written, Writing Technology in Meiji Japan deploys a sophisticated analytical prism to examine the interlocked transformations of literature, language, and visual culture during an historical epoch known for its increasing efforts toward standardization. Meiji Japan is masterfully placed in conversation with the global appearance of new media technologies. The result is a highly original media history that rethinks and re-conceptualizes the emergence of modern Japanese literature and culture, thus making it the deserved winner of the IBP 2017 in the Humanities.

Seth Jacobowitz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures, Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, and a member of the Council on East Asian Studies at the MacMillan Center at Yale University. He is the author of the Edogawa Rampo Reader (Kurodahan Press, 2008) and Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture (Harvard Asia Center, 2015), which won the 2017 International Conventional of Asia Scholars Book Prize in the Humanities. He has been Simon Visiting Professor at University of Manchester, Asakawa Fellow at Waseda University in Tokyo, an invited guest lecturer at Yonsei University in Seoul, and frequent Visiting Researcher to the Center of Japanese Studies at the University of São Paulo. His first field of specialization focused on the intersection of media and literature in late nineteenth century Japan. His current research is for a book on the prewar Japanese immigration to Brazil and the literature of Japanese overseas expansion. In addition, he is co-authoring a book on science and science fiction in prewar Japan with Professor Aaron W. Moore, Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh.