Dr Natalia Doan

Natalia Doan joined the Nissan Institute as the Okinaga Junior Research Fellow in Japanese Studies at Wadham College in 2019. Her research interests include nineteenth-century Japanese history, and the transnational production of resistance, culture, and solidarity. Her doctoral research at Oxford examined encounters between samurai and transnational actors across the globe. Her current research project examines the re-envisioning of Japanese social order enacted by northern samurai on the losing side of Japan’s civil war. She is interested in how Tokugawa thinkers reworked Western and Japanese philosophies of benevolence, hierarchical order, and humanity to envision the future and the making of a strong and sovereign Japan. In 2015, she was awarded the Ivan Morris Memorial Prize from the British Association for Japanese Studies. She has also received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. She is the author of “The 1860 Japanese Embassy and the Antebellum African American Press” (The Historical Journal, 2019), which explores the influence of samurai on African American intellectual history, and “Samurai and Southern Belles: Interracial Romance, Southern Morality, and the 1860 Japanese Embassy” (Journal of Social History, 2020), which examines how interactions between samurai diplomats and American women challenged antebellum hierarchies of race, masculinity, and power.