name: Thomas D. Conlan
genres: Japan, Warfare, History
avg_rating: 3.96
ratings_count: 105
about: Thomas Conlan, Professor of East Asian Studies and History, is interested in the political, social and intellectual transformations of Japan from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries. Majoring in Japanese and History at the University of Michigan, he attended graduate school at Stanford University. Professor Conlan’s first published work, In Little Need of Divine Intervention: Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan, introduced an important picture scroll depicting the Mongol invasions of Japan. His next monograph, State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth Century Japan, based on his Ph.D. dissertation, revealed how warfare transformed the social, political, and intellectual matrix of fourteenth-century Japan. He then wrote a g Thomas Conlan, Professor of East Asian Studies and History, is interested in the political, social and intellectual transformations of Japan from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries. Majoring in Japanese and History at the University of Michigan, he attended graduate school at Stanford University. Professor Conlan’s first published work, In Little Need of Divine Intervention: Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan, introduced an important picture scroll depicting the Mongol invasions of Japan. His next monograph, State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth Century Japan, based on his Ph.D. dissertation, revealed how warfare transformed the social, political, and intellectual matrix of fourteenth-century Japan. He then wrote a general history of the samurai, entitled Weapons and Fighting Techniques of the Samurai Warrior, 1200-1877 . In his most recent book, From Sovereign to Symbol: An Age of Ritual Determinism in Fourteenth Century Japan, Professor Conlan analyzed the nature of political thought in medieval Japan. Currently Professor Conlan is researching Japan’s fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and argues that the Ouchi, a daimyo of western Japan, were the central figures of their age. ...more