The Center extends a warm welcome to Dr. Raja Adal who began a four-year term as Associate Director of the World History Center this month!
Dr. Adal, an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Pitt, is well acquainted with the activities of the Center, serving as a member of the Advisory Board in 2017 and again in 2022. Adal is a historian of modern Japan who has also worked on the Middle East and other parts of Asia. He is currently involved in organizing a series of conferences around the material history of writing, starting with the conference Office Supplies in 2023 (link) and Unicode and the Humanities in 2024 (link). He advises graduate students and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on modern Japan, the comparative history of Asia, and world history.
His first book, Beauty in the Age of Empire, introduces the concept of societies on the receiving end of Western expansion as a way of understanding the experience of societies as distant as Japan and Egypt. It argues that in the case of Japan, Egypt, and other societies on the receiving end of Western expansion, the difference between the perception of Western expansion as a colonial project that sought to dominate or, alternatively, as a civilizational project that sought to educate, was aesthetic.
Adal’s current book project explores office technologies including brushes, typewriters, mimeographs, printing presses and Unicode in the context of global scripts. Its methodological starting point is that, in order to understand these technologies globally, scholarship needs to focus not only discourses but on practices. To do that, for about a decade Adal has been leading a large-scale project to index the Mitsui Mi’ike Mine archive, one of the largest business archives in modern Japan that spans half a century and includes tens of thousands of pages of documents. This archive is both at the center of his current book manuscript and due to be published as an independent online resource. The book and its associated indexing project have been supported by grants from the University of Pittsburgh, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the Japan Foundation, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Welcome to the Center, Raja!