Japan in the Early Modern World: Religion, Translation, and Transnational Relations

Please join us for a hybrid book launch to celebrate the co-edited volume Japan in the Early Modern World. Religion, Translation, and Transnational Relations. There will be a brief introduction to the book and a short panel discussion with the volume’s editors and authors over drinks and nibbles. All are welcome.

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Speakers

Alessandro Bianchi is Head of World Collections at Cambridge University Libraries and leads the curatorial teams responsible for the collections from Asia, Africa, and the Commonwealth. His current research focuses on Japanese illustrated books, as well as print and book history in the global context, with a particular emphasis on the intersections with graphic arts and material culture. Prior to his current role, Alessandro was the manager of the Japanese Library and curator of Japanese rare books and manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries, lectured at Haverford College, and held a curatorial position at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a Trustee of the Bibliographical Society, Treasurer of the National Committee for Information Resources on Asia, a Subject Expert at La Sapienza University in Rome, and a Visiting Researcher at the Art Research Centre of Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto.

Pia Jolliffe is Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford. Her research interests include historical anthropology, children and women’s experiences of the transition from sixteenth to seventeenth century Japan, Buddhist temples as places of memory, and the history Christianity in Japan. Her publications include: ‘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/ 2 (2023), pp. 211-228; and, with Alessandro Bianchi, ‘Jesuit translation practices in sixteenth-century Japan, Sanctos no gosagueo no uchi nuqigaqi and Luis de Granada’ in Jieun Kiaer et al Missionary Translators: Translations of Christian Texts in East Asia. London: Routledge, 2021, pp. 24-56.

Yoshimi Orii is Professor of Spanish Language and Culture at Keio University (Tokyo). Her main area of research is the intellectual exchange between Iberian countries and Japan during the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, primarily through book production and translation. Her studies include Yoshimi Orii. Pietro Alagona’s Compendium Manualis Navarri Published by the Jesuit Mission Press in Early Modern Japan. In: Bragagnolo M (ed) The Production of Knowledge of Normativity in the Age of the Printing Press: Martín de Azpilcueta’s Manual de Confessores from a Global Perspective. (Leiden: Brill | Nijhoff, 2024): Yoshimi Orii and Zamora Calvo María Jesús. Cruces y áncoras: La influencia de Japón y España en un siglo de oro global (Madrid: Abada, 2020).

Katja Triplett is Affiliate Professor of the Study of Religions at  Marburg University, Germany. Her main fields of interest are Buddhism;  religion and translation; religion, health and medicine; visual and  material culture. Currently, she is directing a research project on
translation and the early Jesuit mission in Japan, at Leipzig  University. She has published widely on religions in Japan including  Buddhism and Medicine in Japan: A Topical Survey (500-1600 CE) of a  Complex Relationship (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2021, pb), and “Translations on Martyrdom During the Early Modern Persecution of  Christians in Japan.“ In Jörg Wesche et al. (eds), Contrarieties. Subversive Translation in the Early Modern Period (Berlin, Heidelberg:  J.B. Metzler, 2025), pp. 55–82.