Raja Adal

Raja Adal is a historian of technology, empire, aesthetics, and the materiality of writing whose work has explored global connections and comparisons, using archives in Japanese, Arabic, French German, and Turkish, as well as global and local datasets.  His first book, Beauty in the Age of Empire, introduced the ways in which, for societies on the receiving end of Western expansion like Japan and Egypt, 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 is currently writing a book manuscript about global scripts and the instruments for writing them from the Typewriter to Unicode.  As part of this project, he has co-edited (with Christopher Lowy) a special issue of the Journal of Asian Studies entitled “Unicode and the Humanities,” which is scheduled to appear in October 2026.  This issue includes his article “Big Tech, the Big State, and the Battle for Encoding all of the World's Languages.”  His research on writing systems, typewriters, and Unicode is also appearing in a forthcoming chapter on “Technology and the Savior Myth of Sinographs,” in the Cambridge History of Technology.  These and other works incorporate approaches that include archival work in Japan, India, Turkey, Egypt, and Lebanon, as well as the digital mapping of global datasets and a collaborative project that has indexed more than 38 thousand pages of documents from the Mitsui Mi’ike Mine archive, Japan’s largest prewar mine and one of its largest business archives.

Adal has recently taught undergraduate courses on World History and Modern Japan, as well as a graduate course on Approaches to Asian History.  His undergraduate courses include experiential components like an activity on myth, history, and embodied experiences in Japan, which saw students engage in a woodblock printing exercise that he developed with the University of Pittsburgh libraries.  He also advises graduate students in Japanese history, the history of Asia, and world history..