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2006-2007 Fellows

 

Kären Wigen

Stanford University
Department of History

Kären Wigen trained as a geographer at Berkeley and now teaches History at Stanford. Her early research focused on the economic transformation of the Japanese countryside during the Tokugawa-Meiji transition (The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920); a second book explored the history of geographical ideas in the West (The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Meta-Geography, co-author with Martin Lewis). Recently, she has begun looking at geography textbooks and maps to explore the evolution of regional identity and geographies of the imagination in the alpine reaches of central Honshu.  

Project Summary

Native Places, Global Times: A Century of Regional Rhetoric in Nagano, Japan tracks the shifting contours of Nagano identity over the course of the twentieth century, showing how local elites repeatedly re-positioned their native place in a rapidly changing national and global context. Its aim is to expose the politically charged nature of chorographic education by attending to the media and messages through which local ideologues talk about the nature and function of regional belonging over time.