Current Curriculum Vitae

Stephen Vlastos taught Japanese history. His major field of research has been early modern and modern rural social movements and political economy. He has written on agrarian political economy in the Tokugawa and Meiji periods; agrarianism as an ideology in prewar Japan; protest upheaval in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; "tradition" and modernity in Japanese culture; and Vietnam War historiography. Stephen is currently focusing on Japanese foreign relations in the prewar period, including representations of Japan in Hollywood cinema, and postwwar Japanese national myth-making.

From 2000-2005 Stephen served as director of the UI Center for Asian and Pacific Studies where he secured a major grant from the Freeman Foundation to upgrade undergraduate education in Asian Studies.

Stephen served on numerous national executive and advisory committees related to Japanese studies, including the ACLS-SSRC Joint Committee on Japanese Studies and the Japan Advisory Board of the Social Science Research Council. In 1996 he was elected to the Northeast Asia Council of the Association of Asian Studies, and in 1998-99, he served as chair of that council. Since 2006 he has served as the Japan book review editor for the Journal of Asian Studies. Stephen has been affiliated with several Japanese universities over the years, including Rikkyo, Meiji, Kyoto, and Tokyo Universities. In 1995, he held a Distinguished Visiting Lectureship at Meiji University in Tokyo. In 1999, he was the Visiting Toyota Professor at the University of Michigan Center of Japanese Studies. Stephen earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1977 and a BA from Princeton University in 1966.