Email address: gvanderbilt@gmail.com
Gregory Vanderbilt joined CRCS in June 2014 through its connection with Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, Virginia, a service organization of North American Anabaptist churches. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a dissertation entitled “‘The Kingdom of God is Like a Mustard Seed’: Evangelizing Modernity between the United States and Japan, 1905-1948” and taught in the History Department there. He has also lived in Japan for several years as a high school teacher (Tottori), graduate student (Yokohama and Kyoto), and friend of dreamers (Kumamoto mountains). In addition to his work on Christians and their place in modern Japanese society and politics, he is engaged in comparative research on people who had Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) in Japan and plans to study religious interactions in Indonesia during the Japanese wartime occupation. He is interested in history and memory, literary translation, and all things religious.
Selected Publications :
- “Mengkaji dan Mengajar Kristen di CRCS,” in Studi Agama di Indonesia: Refleksi Pengalaman, edited by Samsul Maarif. Yogyakarta: CRCS, July 2016.
- “‘Smelling of pickled radish, not butter’: the Wartime Search for a Christianity Viable in Japan,” in David Yoo and Albert Park, eds., Encountering Modernity: Christianity and East Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014.
- “The Enigma of Christian Conversion in Modern Japan: the Case of Two Buddhist Priests,” Asia in the Making of Christianity: Conversion, Agency, Indigeneity, 1600s to the Present, edited by Richard Fox Young and Jonathan Seitz. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
- “‘Your Own Sensitivity, At Least’: Remembering the Postwar Poet Ibaragi Noriko, an Appreciation and Four Translations,” The Asia-Pacific Journal. Vol. 9, issue 6, no. 1, February 7, 2011.
- “Translator’s Introduction: Christianity and Conscientious Citizens in Miyata Mitsuo’s Modern Japan” in Miyata Mitsuo, Authority and Obedience: Romans 13:1-7 in Modern Japan. New York: Peter Lang, 2009, pp. vii-xvii.
- “Postwar Japanese Christian Historians, Democracy, and the Problem of the ‘Emperor-System’ State,” in Julius Bautista and Francis Lim Khek Gee, eds., Christianity and the State in Asia: Complicity and Conflict. New York: Routledge, 2009, pp. 59-78.
- Okabe Itsuko, “From a Woman Aggressor: Reflections on Japan and the Asia Pacific War,” Japan Focus May 2008.
