Natalia Doan

natalia doan
Assistant Professor
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
ndoan2@utk.edu

Dr. Natalia Doan’s research and teaching focus on the transnational history of early modern and modern Japan, particularly in connection to popular culture and conceptions of gender, power, and culture. Her work explores Japanese transnational engagement across different times and spaces in the pursuit of solidarity and positive change.

She co-edited the volume Black Transnationalism and Japan (Leiden University Press, 2024), which discloses more than a century of cultural activity and intellectual movements created, shaped, and led by Japanese and Black people. Since before the American Civil War, African American and Japanese encounters produced relationships and discourses of knowledge that transcended Eurocentric conceptions of civilization and hierarchies of personhood. Such transnational encounters reveal not only heretofore hidden historical actors, friendships, and solidarities, but also innovative cultural productions that challenged hierarchies of race, culture, and imperialism. Her next project examines the Boshin War (1868–69) and the interconnectivity of the northern, pro-shogunate domains with transnational actors.

She has written for, among other publications, the Historical Journal and the Journal of Social History, in which her article was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society Alexander Prize. Dr. Doan has appeared in several Japanese documentaries, most recently discussing her research on samurai. Her forthcoming book from Leiden University Press examines the celebrity and transnational influence of samurai overseas in the mid-nineteenth century.

Selected Publications