Congratulations to Dr. Constantine Vaporis, Director, Asian Studies Program, and Professor, History who was awarded a Dresher Center Fellowship for Spring 2017.

Dr. Vaporis' project is Sword and Brush: Portraits of Samurai Life in Early Modern Japan, 1600-1868.

During the Fellowship, Dr. Vaporis will complete his current book manuscript. Despite the widespread appeal of the samurai as cultural icon, there is a dearth of historical scholarship on the subject in English. Sword and Brush will be the first collection of biographies of samurai, who were the political – military elite of early modern, or Tokugawa, society. This volume, which will be aimed at the general reader and is both a social history of early modern Japan told through the biographies of ten samurai and a study of biography as a historical genre.