Dr Pia Maria Jolliffe FRHistS
Research Fellow, Member of the Las Casas Institute
I am a historian of premodern Japan with a particular interest in Japanese Buddhism (material culture and soteriology), historical anthropology, girls’ and women’s histories, Buddhist temples as places of historical memory, the history of Ezo/Hokkaido and the history Christianity in Japan.
At Blackfriars, I teach “Japanese Church History, 1549-2017”. I also teach Early Modern Japanese History through the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and taught “Japanese Buddhism and material culture” to visiting students.
At the moment I am working on a monograph with the provisional title Himegimi. Girls, Buddhist communities and the memory of political defeat in 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 Sengoku to Tokugawa 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 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).