Laura Nenzi, Researching the Margins: Challenges and Consequences of Embarking on a Microhistory Project

Event Description:

Laura Nenzi, one of our very own (2004 PhD) is returning to UCSB to give a lecture about her recent (2015) second book The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko. The talk will focus on the process of researching, writing and then selling to a publisher a micro-history of an itinerant saleswoman of needles and later school teacher of nineteenth-century Japan.

“Researching the margins presents not one but two challenges. First, and perhaps most obvious, how do we do it? Second, how do we sell it? It is to this second challenge that I wish to turn. The dreaded “so what?” question is one every historian must be prepared to answer, but it seems especially relevant when writing about unrepresentative, irrelevant individuals–the extras on the historical stage.  Based on my recent book on the rural teacher and oracle Kurosawa Tokiko (1806-1890), a self-described “base-born nobody” who attempted to change the course of late-Tokugawa history and failed, this presentation offers reflections on the bumpy process of writing, and selling, a work of microhistory in the age of the global.”

Cosponsored by the departments of History and East Asian Language and Cultural Studies, as well as the RE-inventing Japan RFG (IHC) and the East Asia Center.