Adam Clulow
Associate Professor — Ph.D., 2008, Columbia University,

Contact
- E-mail: adam.clulow@austin.utexas.edu
- Phone: 512-475-7267
- Office: Garrison Hall 2.202
- Campus Mail Code: B7000
Biography
Adam Clulow is a historian of early modern Asia. His work is concerned broadly with the transnational circulation of ideas, people, practices and commodities across East and Southeast Asia. Dr. Clulow’s first book, The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan, was published in 2014 and received the Jerry Bentley Book Prize for World History from the American Historical Association, the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) 2015 Humanities Book Prize, the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction 2015 Book Prize, and the W.K. Hancock Prize from the Australian Historical Association. The traditional Chinese translation of The Company and the Shogun (Gōngsī yǔ mùfǔ) was awarded the China Times Open Book Award in 2020. His second book, Amboina, 1623: Conspiracy and Fear on the Edge of Empire, was published by Columbia University Press in 2019. It was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premiers General History Book Prize and was a runner-up for the 2020 Robert W. Hamilton Book Award.
Dr Clulow is the editor of four books: with D.V. Botsman, Commemorating Meiji: History, Politics and the Politics of History (Routledge, 2021); with Tristan Mostert, The Dutch and English East India Companies: Diplomacy, Trade and Violence in Early Modern Asia (Amsterdam University Press, 2018); with Lauren Benton and Bain Attwood, Protection and Empire: A Global History (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and Statecraft and Spectacle in East Asia: Studies in Taiwan-Japan Relations (Routledge, 2010). His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Australian Research Council, the Fung Global Fellows Program (Princeton University), the Japan Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the Mellon Foundation.
Dr. Clulow is the creator of the Amboyna conspiracy trial, an interactive Digital Humanities project focused on a famous seventeenth century case that took place in what is now Indonesia. It received the New South Wales Premiers History Award (Multimedia History Prize) in 2017. Along with colleagues at Monash University, he developed the Virtual Angkor project which aims to recreate the sprawling Cambodian metropolis of Angkor at the height of the Khmer Empire’s power and influence around 1300. It received the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History and the 2021 Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize from the Medieval Academy of America.
At UT, Dr Clulow is the Editor of Not Even Past, a digital magazine that received over 650,000 page views last year, and the co-creator with Daina Ramey Berry of the Beyond 2020 project. In 2019, he founded Epoch: History Games Initiative which is designed to generate a pipeline of historically based video games for use in high schools, community colleges and universities. Its first game, Ako: A Tale of Loyalty, was developed in Spring 2020 and is now available for use in the classroom. For his work in bringing technology into the humanities classroom, he has received faculty, university and national teaching prizes for outstanding contributions to student learning.
Courses
HIS 350L • Piracy In East Asia
39660 • Fall 2021
Meets TTH 11:00AM-12:30PM CMA 5.190
IIWr
HIS 350L • Global Commodities: Asia And T
38720 • Spring 2020
Meets TTH 12:30PM-2:00PM RLP 0.122
GCIIWr
(also listed as ANS 361)
HIS 364G • The Age Of The Samurai
38405 • Fall 2019
Meets TTH 12:30PM-2:00PM ART 1.110
GC
(also listed as ANS 372)
Epoch: History Games Initiative
Epoch: History Games Initiative represents a new student-driven vehicle for the History Department at UT to engage with the vast and growing video games industry. Launched in 2020, it aims to generate a pipeline of historically based video games for use in the classroom.
In early 2020, we set about recruiting students for an experiment: Could four History majors design a fully functional, historically accurate video game across the course of a single semester. The experiment was driven, first, by an awareness of the dramatic growth of the video games industry in recent years and, second, by a sense that History departments including our own needed to engage more closely with what has become a key conduit for students in our classes.
At current estimates, video games are a $120 billion industry and one that is growing rapidly every year. For university students in particular, video games are pervasive. According to surveys, more than 70% of college students play video games, even more watch gaming content streamed on a range of services and the overwhelming majority report some exposure to video games across multiple platforms. At the same time, video games have become an increasingly important gateway for majors. Many students who enter our classrooms come to History via historically-based games which proliferate across multiple platforms.
Historians can engage with video games in two basic ways. First, we can deploy them much as a film or a novel to interrogate popular understandings of particular topics, moments or figures. Second, we can use them as a learning tool by asking students to design their own games. This was our approach.
The task for the semester was to design a fully playable game that could be used in the classroom. The game was constrained by a set of guidelines. First, it had to be built around a historical episode known variously as Chushingura, the 47 ronin or the Akō incident. One of the most celebrated but also controversial episodes in Japanese history, the Akō incident took place between 1701 and 1703 and centered on an act of revenge carried out by a group of samurai against the perceived enemy of their dead master. It laid bare the tensions between the myths and the realities of samurai life in this period, between legality and morality, and between the need for order and the desire for honor.
Second, the Games Team had to develop a game with a clear educational payoff that could provide a window into the difficult life of a low-ranking samurai family in the eighteenth century. To ensure stability, the Tokugawa regime that governed Japan worked to preserve and secure the samurai class while also stripping them of the right to use violence. Placed on fixed stipends, many samurai and their families fell deeply into debt. The game had to draw on and make connections to the most recent scholarship on the lived realities of the Tokugawa samurai, providing a series of teaching points that educators could use to design lesson plans around. Third, the game had to be developed on zero budget, using only free, publicly available platforms and software without purchasing game assets. With these requirements in place, the Games Team was given total freedom to design the characters, the narrative and the game as a whole.
Over the semester, the Games team dedicated hundreds of hours to the task. The result was impressive: a deep learning experience and a fully functional game, Ako: A Test of Loyalty, that is linked to contemporary scholarship. By the end of the semester in May 2020, the game was distributed to beta-testers who provided feedback. In September 2020, it will be used for the first time in a university setting as an educational resource and then released on commercial platforms where it will be available for download at no charge.