Robert Stolz

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Field Specialties

Ecology and Social Theory, Materialist views of nature and politics, Modern Japanese intellectual history and politics

Manuscript project: Bad Water: A Cultural History of Industrial Pollution in Japan
This project seeks to connect the social to the environmental through an investigation of Japan’s experience with industrial pollution in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using scientific, philosophical, literary, and historical texts, I examine what I call Japan’s “environmental turn” in thought and politics after 1900. In ways different from the "bad water" mentioned in Tokugawa peasant protests, the pollution of the late nineteenth century was seen by activists as threatening the newly-won political freedoms of the 1870s Popular Rights and Liberty Movement. The realization that the environment permeated the human body and was therefore a necessary category of social thought undermined the self-contained, autonomous individual of classic and Meiji Utilitarianism—making the environment the starting point of a new politics. After 1900, for many thinkers, the search for new forms of social organization started with an investigation of nature. I argue that it was the emergence of industrial pollution that lead to reconceptualizing nature and the environment which in turn authorized the beginning of an environmental politics. This new politics was seen in flood-control politics, eminent domain, political ecology, literary expression, and Taisho-era (1912-26) “vitalism” (seimeishughi)—a way of thought close to Deep Ecology. This project seeks to recapture this history and link it to conceptualizations of post-war pollution and “high-growth economics" debates as a way to reorganize modern Japanese history.

Education

• Ph. D. University of Chicago 2006
  

Selected Publications

• "Remake politics, not nature: Tanaka Shozo's philosophies of "poison" and "flow" and Japan's environment." in Japan Focus, January 23. 2007.
  
  
• “Nature over Nation: Tanaka Shozo’s Fundamental River Law,” Japan Forum 18:3 (2006). 417-37.
  
  
• Translation: Tosaka Jun’s “The Principle of Everydayness and Historical Time (1934)” in From Japan’s Modernity: A Reader, Select Papers, vol. 11 (Chicago: Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago, 2002). 155-66.

Recent Conference Papers

• “The ‘Space of Everydayness’ and the Materialist View of History,” Washington and Southeast Japan Seminar. Georgetown University, 25 May 2008
  
  
• “Ashio’s Hokkaido Legacy: Snow Brand Dairy,” Modern Japanese Workshop: Locating the Environment in Japanese History. Amherst College, 26 April 2008.
  
  
• “Tosaka Jun’s ‘On Space’ (1931) and the Materialist View of History”, AAS panel 54 “Re-reading Marxist Philosopher and Cultural Critic Tosaka Jun” with Ken Kawashima, Fabian Schaefer, Takeshi Kimoto, and Harry Harootunian (discussant). Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Atlanta, GA, 4 April 2008.
  
  
• “Nature over Nation: Tanaka Shōzō’s Fundamental River Law”, AAS panel 110 “Ecology and the Industrial State: The Beginnings of Environmentalism in Modern Japan with Brett Walker, Gregory Golley, and Julia Adeney Thomas (discussant). Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, 2 April 2005.

Selected Awards

• Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Research Fellow, Waseda University, 2008-9
• Japan Teaching Fellow, University of Chicago, 2005
• Dissertation Writing Fellowship, Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago, 2003-4
• Fulbright (IIE) Graduate Research Fellowship (Japan), 2001-3
• Passed with Distinction Ph.D. Field Examinations, 2000
• Toyota Teaching Assistant Fellow, 2000-1
• FLAS (Title VI) Japanese Fellowship, 1999-2000, renewed 2000-1
• University of Chicago fellowship, 1999-2003
• Vincent Tegeder Award for Outstanding Senior Thesis (History), St. John’s University, Collegeville, MN 1992

Contact Information

Robert Stolz
Assistant Professor of History
915 Volunteer Boulevard
6th Floor, Dunford Hall
Knoxville, TN 37996-4065

Office: (865) 974-9870
Fax: (865) 974-3915
E-mail: rstolz@utk.edu