Pia Jolliffe

Current Projects

At the moment I am working on a monograph with the provisional title Himegimi. Girls, Buddhist communities and the memory of political defeat in Japan (1595-1630). Focusing on Buddhist temples and communities’ roles in protecting and transmitting the histories of the girls and women related to the household of Toyotomi Hidetsugu (1568-1595), I demonstrate how viewing the transition from Sengoku to Tokugawa Japan through female experiences draws our attention to individuals and communities who lost their lives and livelihoods during Japan’s “re-unification” process and thus to alternative histories of the period. I argue that claiming history outside the remit of state control seems to be an important function of Japanese Buddhist temples and the communities attached to them.

I am also in the early stages of a project on girls who grew up in Imperial Buddhist convents (amamonzeki) in early modern Japan, currently working on a paper entitled “Meishō tennō and her tonsured siblings: Monastic and dynastic successions in seventeenth century Japan”. Moreover, I have a longstanding interest in the nineteenth century history of Ezo/Hokkaido and the various peoples moving around the Sea of Okhotsk.

Courses Taught

Early Modern Japanese History, Japanese Church History 1549-2017
Japanese Buddhism and Material Culture

Biography

I studied Japanese Studies in Vienna, Asian Studies in Geneva and earned my DPhil in International Development at the University of Oxford. Since 2016 I have been teaching Japanese history to Oxford students as well as to visiting students. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Educational Background

DPhil, International Development, University of Oxford
DESS, Asian Studies, University of Geneva
Mag. Phil. Japanese Studies, University of Vienna

Research Interests

I am a historian of Japan with a particular interest in historical anthropology, girls’ and women’s histories, Japanese Buddhism and material culture as well as Buddhist temples as places of historical memory, the history of Ezo/Hokkaido and the history Christianity in Japan.

Publications

Books: 

2025 Japan in the Early Modern World. Religion, Translation, and Transnational Relations. Stuttgart: J.M. Metzler (co-editors Katja Triplett and Orii Yoshimi);
2018 Southeast Asian Education in Modern History: Schools, Manipulation, and Contest. London: Routledge (co-editor Thomas Richard Bruce);
2018 Prisons and Forced Labour in Japan. The Colonization of Hokkaido, 1881-1894. London: Routledge;
2016 Learning, Migration and Intergenerational Relations. The Karen and the Gift of Education. London: Palgrave Macmillian;

Articles, book chapters:

(forthcoming) “Childhood in Premodern Japanese Religion” in Oxford Bibliographies in Buddhism. Oxford: Oxford University Press (with Or Porath)
2025 ‘”This Iaponian Palme-tree of Christian Fortitude” – Jesuit letters from Japan in early modern England’, in Katja Triplett, Yoshimi Orii and Pia Jolliffe eds. Japan in the Early Modern World. Religion, Translation, and Transnational Relations. Stuttgart: J.M. Metzler
2023 ‘Naughty, bold, and blessed: Sixteenth-century Japanese children’s voices mediated in the writings of Luís Fróis’ Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Vol. 16, no. 2, 211-228;
2023 ‘Potato Puppet Theater/Beating the Beauties: A Seventeenth-Century Japanese Picture Book for Children’, with Keller Kimbrough, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Vol. 16, no. 2, 197-210;
2021  ‘Jesuit translation practices in sixteenth-century Japan, Sanctos no gosagueo no uchi nuqigaqi and Luis de Granada’, with Alessandro Bianchi, in Jieun Kiaer et al Missionary Translators: Translations of Christian Texts in East Asia. London: Routledge;
2020 ‘Forced Labour in Imperial Japan’s First Colony: Hokkaido’ The Asia-Pacific Journal. Japan Focus. Vol. 18, Issue 2, Number 6;