Dr Pia Maria Jolliffe FRHistS
Research Fellow, Member of the Las Casas Institute
I am a historian of Japan with a particular interest in historical anthropology, girls’ and boys’ experiences of the transition from sixteenth to seventeenth century Japan, Buddhist temples as places of memory, and the history Christianity in Japan. In 2022 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and enjoy teaching Japanese history to a variety of people, including university students, school children and adult learners.
At the moment I am working on a monograph with the provisional title Himegimi. Girls, Buddhism and the memory of political defeat in early modern Japan (1595-1630). Focusing on the case study of the women and children of Toyotomi Hidetsugu’s household, my multi-sited historical anthropological study reveals girls’ and young women’s roles during Japan’s long civil war. I argue that viewing the transition from sixteenth to seventeenth century Japan through the girls, boys and women of the Hidetsugu household, draws our attention to individuals and Buddhist communities who lost their lives and livelihoods during Japan’s “re-unification” process and thus to alternative histories of the period.
I recently published with Katja Triplett and Yoshimi Orii our co-edited volume Japan in the Early Modern World. Religion, Translation, and Transnational Relations. I also continue working on referenced entries for each of the twenty-six martyrs of Nagasaki (1597) for the Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (Traugott Bautz Verlag).
I am in the early stages of a new project on the child Empress Meisho (1624-1696) and her siblings who grew up in Buddhist imperial convents in seventeenth century Japan and shall give an invited paper on this topic at a conference on “Dynastic Reproduction in Early Modern Eurasia” to be held 10-12 June 2026 at the University of Basel.
Selected Publications
Books:
2025 Japan in the Early Modern World. Religion, Translation, and Transnational Relations. Stuttgart: J.M. Metzler (co-editors Katja Triplett and Orii Yoshimi);
2018 Southeast Asian Education in Modern History: Schools, Manipulation, and Contest. London: Routledge (co-editor Thomas Richard Bruce);
2018 Prisons and Forced Labour in Japan. The Colonization of Hokkaido, 1881-1894. London: Routledge;
2016 Learning, Migration and Intergenerational Relations. The Karen and the Gift of Education. London: Palgrave Macmillian;
Articles, book chapters:
JAPANESE STUDIES
(forthcoming) “Childhood in Premodern Japanese Religion” in Oxford Bibliographies in Buddhism. Oxford: Oxford University Press (with Or Porath)
2025 ‘”This Iaponian Palme-tree of Christian Fortitude” – Jesuit letters from Japan in early modern England’, in Katja Triplett, Yoshimi Orii and Pia Jolliffe eds. Japan in the Early Modern World. Religion, Translation, and Transnational Relations. Stuttgart: J.M. Metzler
2023 ‘Naughty, bold, and blessed: Sixteenth-century Japanese children’s voices mediated in the writings of Luís Fróis’ Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Vol. 16, no. 2, 211-228;
2023 ‘Potato Puppet Theater/Beating the Beauties: A Seventeenth-Century Japanese Picture Book for Children’, with Keller Kimbrough, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Vol. 16, no. 2, 197-210;
2021 ‘Jesuit translation practices in sixteenth-century Japan, Sanctos no gosagueo no uchi nuqigaqi and Luis de Granada’, with Alessandro Bianchi, in Jieun Kiaer et al Missionary Translators: Translations of Christian Texts in East Asia. London: Routledge;
2020 ‘Forced Labour in Imperial Japan’s First Colony: Hokkaido’ The Asia-Pacific Journal. Japan Focus. Vol. 18, Issue 2, Number 6;
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
2020 ‘The Integration of Syrian Asylum Seekers in Austria in Light of Catholic Social Teaching’, in Leonardo Schiocchet, Christine Nölle-Karimi and Monika Mokre (eds) Agency and Tutelage in Forced Migration, ROR-n Plattform 2(1), Vienna: ROR-n, Austrian Academy of Science, 196-200;
2019 ‘Ageing and Fertility: Legal and Ethical Perspectives’, with William Jolliffe, in Andelka M Phillips, Thana C de Campos and Jonathan Herring (eds) Philosophical Foundations of Medical Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 264-274;
2018 ‘Honouring the elders: The common good among Karen communities – a multi-sited ethnography’, with Shirley Worland, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 29/2, 158-170;
2018 ‘Child Migration to the UK. Hopes and Realities’, with Samuel Burke, in Ben Ryan (ed) Fortress Britain? Ethical Approaches to Immigration Policy for a Post-Brexit Britain, London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 134-153;
2016 ‘Night-time and refugees. Evidence from the Thai-Myanmar border’ Journal of Refugee Studies 29/1, 1-18;2008 ‘Sleeping as a Refuge? Embodied Vulnerability and Corporeal Security during Refugees’ Sleep at the Thai-Burma Border’, in Lodewijk Brunt and Brigitte Steger (eds) Worlds of Sleep, Berlin: Frank and Timme, 193- 210;
2007 ‘Into the jungle of bureaucracy: negotiating access to camps at the Thai-Burma border’, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 26/3, 51-60;
2006 In the absence of the humanitarian gaze: refugee camps after dark, New Issues in Refugee Research, Policy Development and Evaluation Service, Geneva: UNHCR (Research Paper; 137).