David Ambaras
Associate Professor, Advisor
Ph. D., Princeton University 1999
M. A., Princeton University 1995
M. A., The University of Tokyo 1991
License, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales 1986
B. A., Columbia University 1984
Research Interests
Professor Ambaras's research explores the social history of Japan and its empire, particularly through a focus on deviance and marginality. His current work examines lower-class mobility, child trafficking, geographies of class, gender, and ethnicity, and representations of “spaces of distress” in modern Japan and in East Asia under Japanese imperialism. His first book, Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2006), shows how the policing of urban youth constituted a central arena for the development of new state structures and new forms of disciplinary power, the articulation of new class, gender, and family relations, and the regulation of popular culture during the years 1895 to 1945.
Teaching Interests
Professor Ambaras's upper-level courses focus on modern Japan, Japanese imperialism, Western missionaries in East Asia, and the history of Tokyo. He is also planning to develop courses on gender in Japan, Japan in the Cold War, and migration and urbanization in Asia.
Recent Work & Publications
- “Topographies of Distress: Tokyo, c. 1930.” in Noir Urbanisms, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton University Press, 2010)
- “Juvenile Delinquency and the National Defense State: Policing Young Workers in Wartime Japan, 1937-1.” The Journal of Asian Studies , no. 63, no. 1 (2004): 31-60
- “Social Knowledge, Cultural Capital, and the New Middle Class in Modern Japan, 1895-1912..” The Journal of Japanese Studies , no. 24, no. 1 (1998): 1-33
