Dr Pia Maria Jolliffe FRHistS
Research Fellow, Member of the Las Casas Institute
I am a historian of early modern Japan with a particular interest in:
- the transition from Warring States to Edo period Japan (sixteenth and seventeenth century) through the microhistories of girls and young women. The archives of Buddhist temples as well as the oral histories of local communities are particularly relevant for this kind of research.
- Catholicism and transnational relations between early modern Japan and Europe, through the microhistories of translated and globally circulated missionary letters, reports, and books.
At Blackfriars, I teach “Japanese Church History, 1549-2017”. I am also a Teaching Associate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and offer courses in “Early Modern Japanese History” as well as “Japanese Buddhism and Material Culture”.
At the moment I am working on a monograph with the provisional title Himegimi. Girls, Buddhist communities and the memory of political defeat in civil war Japan (1595-1630). Focusing on Buddhist temples and communities’ roles in protecting and transmitting the histories of the girls and women related to the household of Toyotomi Hidetsugu (1568-1595), I demonstrate how viewing the transition from Warring States to Edo period Japan through female experiences draws our attention to individuals and communities who lost their lives and livelihoods during Japan’s “re-unification” process and thus to alternative histories of the period. I argue that claiming history outside the remit of state control seems to be an important function of Japanese Buddhist temples and the communities attached to them.
I am also in the early stages of a project on the microhistories of girls who grew up in Imperial Buddhist convents (amamonzeki) in early modern Japan, currently working on a paper entitled “Meisho tenno and her tonsured siblings: Monastic and dynastic successions in seventeenth century Japan”. Moreover, I have a longstanding interest in the nineteenth century history of Ezo/Hokkaido and the various peoples moving around the Sea of Okhotsk.
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).