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February 5, 2026

[MJHA] New Books on Japan: "Renaming Plants and Nations in Japanese Colonial Korea"

From: Dahlberg-Sears, Robert <dahlberg-sears.1@buckeyemail.osu.edu>
Date: 2026/01/15
Dear Colleagues,
A Happy New Year from the Modern Japan History Association (www.mjha.org). 
Please join us for the first of our scheduled events this year, an entry in our New Books on Japan lecture series, with Jung Lee (Ewha Women's University) who will discuss her new book, ""Renaming Plants and Nations in Japanese Colonial Korea" (Routledge, 2025). Please see the details below. As always, registration is requested via zoom link, and feel free to share widely.
(N. America) Thursday, January 22, 2026 | 8:00-9:30 PM ET
(Japan) Friday, January 23, 2026 | 7:00-8:30 AM JST

REGISTER FOR ZOOM
Renaming Plants and Nations in Japanese Colonial Korea (Routledge, 2025)
Presenter: Jung Lee, Associate Professor, Ewha Women's University
Discussant: Ian Miller, Reischauer Institute Professor of Environmental History, Harvard University
Moderator: Joseph Seeley, Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia
The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Jung Lee, who will be speaking about her new book Renaming Plants and Nations in Japanese Colonial Korea (Routledge, 2025). This book studies a striking example of intensely negotiated colonial scientific practice: the case of botanical practice in Korea during the Japanese colonization from 1910 to 1945. The shared aim of botanists who encountered one another in colonial Korea to practice "modern Western botany" is successfully revealed through analysis of their fieldwork and subsequent publications. By exploring the variations in what that term should mean and the politically charged nature of the interactions between both imperial and colonial players, Renaming Plants and Nations reveals how botanists of the region created a form of scientific practice that was neither clearly Western nor particularly modern. It shows how the botany that evolved in this context was a product of colonially resourced, globally connected practice, immersed in intertwined traditions, rather than simply a copy of "modern Western botany." Ian Miller (Harvard) will serve as interlocutor.

Robert M. Dahlberg-Sears
Part-time Lecturer
Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University | 上智大学
7-1 Kioicho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-8554

Approved by ssjmod at 02:19 PM