About

Natalia Doan is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 

 

She graduated with a BA in English and Japanese (Departmental Honors) from Vassar College, and has a MSc in Japanese Studies and a DPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford.

 

Her research interests include nineteenth-century Japanese history, and the transnational production of resistance, culture, and solidarity. Her doctoral research at Oxford examined encounters between samurai and transnational actors across the globe. Her current research project examines the re-envisioning of Japanese social order enacted by northern samurai on the losing side of Japan’s civil war. She is interested in how Tokugawa thinkers reworked Western and Japanese philosophies of benevolence, hierarchical order, and humanity to envision the future and the making of a strong and sovereign Japan.

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In 2022, her work was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society Alexander Prize. She has also received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania for her research on the transnational encounters of imagined romance and fantasy between samurai and American women. In 2015, she was awarded the Ivan Morris Memorial Prize from the British Association for Japanese Studies.

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