Toma-Jin
Morikawa-Fouquet

DPhil in History, 2023–, (University of Oxford, St. Catherine’s College)

MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History 2022–23 (University of Cambridge, Trinity College), distinction.

MSc in Japanese Studies 2021–22 (University of Oxford, St. Catherine’s College), distinction.

BA in Anthropology and Political Science 2019–2021 (Amherst College), summa cum laude with distinction, Phi Beta Kappa.

Undergraduate student, Political Science with a concentration in International Relations (no degree), Doshisha University 2016–2019.

Exchange student, University of California at Berkeley, 2017–2018.

My research spans across intellectual history, cultural history, and the history of science of modern Japan viewed from transnational, non-state, and non-imperial perspectives. Generally, I am interested in building novel theories, concepts, and methods from the bottom-up—particularly through the history of alternatives that have eluded the conceptual contours of historiography and social theory.

I am pursuing a DPhil in History as a Clarendon scholar, generously funded by the Oxford-Kobe Scholarship tenable at St. Catherine’s College. My doctorate dissertation looks at translations of popular science in transwar and transnational Japan as political expressions of emancipatory knowledge-making, including entomology, sexology, psychology, ufology, occult sciences, and monstrology (yōkai gaku).

I completed my second master’s degree in Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge with full funding from Trinity College, where I wrote a thesis titled “An Intellectual Culture of Cosmology, Aesthetics, and Morality in Late Meiji Japan” that was selected to be deposited in the Seeley Library. Prior to Cambridge, I completed a master’s degree in Japanese Studies at Oxford, where I was also a Clarendon and Oxford-Kobe scholar. My MSc dissertation, “Anarchist Deracialization and Hirano Imao in Transwar Japan (1920–1970s),” was awarded the Arthur Stockwin Best Dissertation Prize by the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies in 2022 and the Ivan Morris Memorial Prize (second prize) by the British Association for Japanese Studies in 2023.

I transferred to Amherst College in the U.S.A. for my bachelor’s with a fully funded Niijima Scholarship, and my undergraduate honours thesis titled “Reinterpreting Waltzian Anarchy: Neoliberal Governmentality in Kenneth Waltz’s Imagination of ‘the International’” was supported by the Gregory S. Call Undergraduate Research Fellowship. Before transferring to Amherst, I spent 3.5 years enrolled at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, where I was awarded an Undergraduate Award for Distinction in 2018. For one of those years, I studied at the University of California at Berkeley under an exchange study abroad program, which was partially funded by the Gyomu Super Japan Dream Foundation Scholarship.

My graduate studies have also been supported by a Rufus B. Kellogg University Fellowship from Amherst College (2021–2024), where I delivered the 2024 Kellogg Lecture.

Research keywords:

transnational/global intellectual history, cultural history, history of science, non-state and non-imperial history, democracy, Japan, (political) cosmology and ecology, environmentalism, symbiosis, race & ethnicity, gender & sexuality, anarchism, mysticism, and the supernatural (UFOs, monsters, ghosts).