Mark Ravina
Professor — Ph.D. Stanford University, 1991, A.B. Columbia University, 1983
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Chair in Japanese Studies

Contact
- E-mail: mark.ravina@austin.utexas.edu
- Office: Garrison 3.502
- Office Hours: Spring 2020: Tues and Wed 3:00-4:00 PM
- Campus Mail Code: B7000
Biography
My specialty is Japanese history, especially eighteenth and nineteenth-century politics, but my broader methodological interest is in the transnational and international dimension of state-building. My third book, To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration as World History was published in 2017 by Oxford University Press and won the best book prize of the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. My early work on that topic, based on a paper I delivered a Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study was published as "State-Making in Global Context: Japan in a World of Nation-States." In The Teleology of the Modern Nation-State, edited by Joshua Fogel, 87-104. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
My current research focuses on political language in nineteenth-century Japan, with a focus on text mining. In summer 2017 I ran, together with Hoyt Long and Molly DesJardin, a text mining workshop focused on the unique challenges of Japanese texts.
In public scholarship, I recently completed a 24-part course for The Great Courses, co-branded with the Smithsonian Institution, entitled Understanding Japan. I am currently working on a second course on modern Japan.
In 2004 I published a biography of Saigō Takamori entitled The Last Samurai (John Wiley & Sons). Saigō was the inspiration for the character Katsumoto in the Tom Cruise film, also entitled The Last Samurai. I had begun working on the book without any knowledge of the movie, but the Warner Brothers film sparked a surge in general interest on Saigō. I appeared as a "guest expert" on CNN and on two History Channel programs: "History vs. Hollywood" and "The Samurai."The Last Samurai been translated into Chinese, Russian, and Polish. My first book was Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan (Stanford, 1999), also published in Japanese translation as Meikun no satetsu 名君の蹉跌 (NTT shuppan 2004).