Michael Burns

Michael Burns is a Ph.D. student in East Asian history specializing in the social history of late medieval and early modern Japan (~1500-1868). He is particularly interested in state formation, urbanization,  and social stratification in the early modern world. His dissertation project centers around the rapid urbanization of Japan’s ancient capital city, Kyoto, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Broadly speaking, his goal is to expand our understanding of Japan’s early modern urbanization beyond a straightforward national political narrative, connecting it to the broader global urbanization trends of this period. To this end, he is working with materials that reveal how merchants, craftsmen, and other commoners interacted with local government and with each other, shaping the city’s physical and social space.

Michael received his B.A. in History and Japanese Language and Literature from the University of Kansas. After graduating, he worked as a Coordinator for International Relations in the municipal government of Niseko, Japan. He later received his M.A. in East Asian Studies at Yale, writing a master’s thesis that explored how one group of medieval hereditary retainers maintained their status under the newly-formed Tokugawa shogunate and came to serve as the police force of early modern Kyoto.

While at Yale, he has also contributed to collaborative research efforts, including the Digital Tokugawa Lab. Recently, he has participated in an ongoing archival project cataloguing Yale’s newly-acquired collection of early modern Japanese documents. This collection includes the personal archive of a rural village headsman family in Hiroshima domain, among others.