David Spafford

Headshot Of David Spafford

Graduate ChairAssociate Professor, Pre-Modern Japanese History

215-573-9613

855 Williams Hall

Office Hours
By appointment
Education

PhD, History, University of California, Berkeley, 2006.

Courses Taught

EALC 0040: Introduction to Japanese Civilization

EALC 073: Freshman Seminar: Culture and Conflict: Japan's Long Sixteenth Century

EALC 3742: City and Citizenship: Warrior Politics and Commoner Culture in Early Modern Japan

EALC 1746: The Age of the Samurai

EALC 3641: Readings in Classical Japanese

EALC 3744: Bandits, Pirates, and Peasants: Lawlessness and Violence in Premodern Japan          

EALC 1742: From Shamans to Shoguns: A Textual History of Premodern Japan

EALC 276: Warriors, Peasants, and Monks in Medieval Japan

EALC 4030: Major Seminar: Information and Nation in Japan

EALC 8741: Early Modern Japanese History: Travel Print Nation

Selected Publications

“Crests and Familial Identity in Medieval Japan.” In The Hidden Language of Graphic Signs, ed. Stephen Houston and John Bodel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

“Warrior Regimes and the Regulation of Violence in Medieval Japan.” In The Cambridge World History of Violence, vol. 2, 500–1500 CE, ed. Matthew S. Gordon, Richard W. Kaeuper, and Harriet Zurndorfer, 143–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 

“The Language and Contours of Familial Obligation in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Japan.” In What is a Family? Answers from Early Modern Japan, ed. Mary Elizabeth Berry and Marcia Yonemoto, 2346. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019.

 “Handed Down in the Family: The Past and Its Uses in the Kan’ei Genealogies of 1643.” The Journal of Japanese Studies 42, no. 2 (Summer 2016), 279-314.  

“What’s in a Name? House Revival, Adoption, and the Bounds of Family in Late Medieval Japan.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 74, no. 2 (December 2014): 283-331

“Emperor and Shogun, Pope and King: The Development of Japan’s Warrior Aristocracy.” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 88, no. 1 (April 2014): 11-19. 

A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013.

“An Apology of Betrayal: Political and Narrative Strategies in a Late Medieval Memoir.” Journal of Japanese Studies 35, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 321-52.

 

In Preparation:

“Law in a Feuding Society,” chapter for vol. 1 of the new Cambridge History of Japan, ed. Laura Hines, David Howell, and Hitomi Tonomura. Forthcoming.

Lady of the House: The Documents of Jukeini and Warrior Authority in Sixteenth-Century Japan, in preparation. 

 

Other:

"The Meanings of Violence," episode for the East Asian Studies Center Podcast, Indiana University, February 23, 2024.