Fabian Drixler

Fabian Drixler teaches Japanese history. He is particularly interested in cultural history and historical demography, approaches that converge in his dissertation, Infanticide and Fertility in Eastern Japan: Discourse and Demography, 1660-1880 (Harvard 2008).  This study charts the rise and destruction of a premodern society in which couples raised only two to three children. Highlighting the role of contingency and individual agency in demographic history, it connects population patterns with changing understandings of human life, political space, and the nature of time.

Courses taught in 2008/2009:

• History 327J       Navigating Life in Nineteenth-Century Japan

• History 885        Readings in Japanese History from 1600

• History 306        East Asia, 500 to the Present (with Peter Perdue)

• History 325J       Infanticide and Foundlings in Asia and Europe Before 1900