edX Online
Instructor photo

Michael Facius

Associate Professor at Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo

Areas of expertise

  • - Global History
  • - Cultural History of Japan (Early Modern & Modern)
  • - History of Knowledge
  • - Translation Studies

Major works

  • 'A Rankean Moment in Japan: The persona of the historian and the globalization of the discipline, c. 1900', Modern Intellectual History (2020).
  • 'Transcultural Philology in 19th-century Japan: the case of Shigeno Yasutsugu (1827-1910), Philological Encounters 3 (2018), 3-33.
  • China übersetzen: Globalisierung und chinesisches Wissen in Japan im 19. Jahrhundert [Translating China: Chinese knowledge and globalization in nineteenth-century Japan], (Campus: Frankfurt am Main, 2017).
  • 'Japanisch – Kundoku – Chinesisch. Zur Geschichte von Sprache und Übersetzung in Japan' [Japanese - Kundoku - Chinese. On the history of language and translation in Japan], Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38 (2012), 217-242.

Social links

About me

Michael is a historian with research interests in the early modern and modern cultural history of Japan in its regional, transnational and global contexts. He is particularly fascinated by the changing patterns of knowledge exchange and circulation and the history of language and translation. Currently he is working on a book project on the functions and uses of Edo-period history in modern Japan.

Michael received his PhD in Global History and Japanese Studies at Freie Universität Berlin in 2016. He was a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the Centre for Transnational History, University College London from 2018-2020. He holds diplomas in college teaching and e-teaching and has taught and supervised in German, English and Japanese in Japanese Studies, East Asian Studies, History, Global History, Transnational Studies and Chinese Health and Humanity at Freie Universität Berlin, University College London, the University of Tokyo and during ERASMUS lectureships at Leiden and Cambridge.