Associate Professor Elise K. Tipton

BA, Wellesley College; EdM, Boston University; MA, Wesleyan University; PhD, Indiana University
Chair of Department
536 Brennan MacCallum Building A18

+61 2 9351 4718

Elise Tipton is Chair of Japanese Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures. She teaches in both the Japanese Studies and Asian Studies programs and carries out research in the social and political history of early twentieth century Japan, with a particular interest in issues of modernity during the interwar period.

Elise Tipton has just completed work on the second edition of Modern Japan: A Social and Political History, which will be published in 2008. During 2008 she is conducting research on a study leave project, entitled ‘Department Stores and the Emergence of Modern Consumerism in Early Twentieth Century Japan’.
This is an extension of a larger project on modernity supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant that sought to explain the state’s increasing intervention in daily life during the 1930s by examining the relatively neglected sphere of moral regulation.

Elise Tipton is the author of The Japanese Police State: The Tokkô in Interwar Japan (1991) as well as Modern Japan: A Social and Political History (2002). She is the editor of Society and the State in Interwar Japan (1997) and co-editor with John Clark of Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to 1930s (2000). She has also written many book chapters and journal articles related to the history of birth control, modern urban entertainments, social welfare policies, political police, and changing women’s roles during the early decades of the twentieth century.

Modern Japan: A Social and Political History follows the interest and approach of the edited volumes in exploring the intersection of social and political developments in the history of Japan from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. The book’s systematic coverage of women, minorities and everyday life distinguishes it from other histories of modern Japan. Tipton’s other recent publications related to her project on modernity and moral regulation also focus on the complex relationship between society and the state, for example, ‘Cleansing the Nation: Urban Entertainments and Moral Reform in Interwar Japan’, published in Modern Asian Studies during 2007.

Teaching

Modern Japanese social history; Japanese historical debates and historiography; cultural interactions between Australia and Asia.

Supervision

Modern Japanese history, including women’s history, nationalism, and modernity.

Elise Tipton was President of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia from 2001 to 2003. She is a member of the editorial boards of Japanese Studies, Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, and the Asian Studies Review and was the Japan and Korea editor of Asian Studies Review from 2001 to 2005.

She is currently the Chair of Japanese Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures, but will be on a Special Studies Program leave during Semester Two 2008. During her leave she will spend some time in Japan as an Exchange Researcher at Waseda University.