14
THE HARVARD CRIMSON
FIFTEEN QUESTIONS
I
an J. Miller is a historian studying empire and energy in modern Japan and East Asia. He is a history professor, Faculty Dean of Cabot House, and Director of Undergraduate Studies. FM: Tell me why Japan is fascinating. IJM: As a historian, Japan’s fascinating because it’s the world’s first non-Western, industrialized, and imperial power. And so it embodies so many of the tensions and possibilities of what it means to be in this modern world of ours. When you stand somewhere else, you look at the world through someone else’s eyes or you work with historical documents, reading into those powerful texts, it can be empowering. Because it lets us, and hopefully lets our students, see that the world can be different, that they can change it. That we can change it. And I write mostly out of that passion.
APRIL 14, 2023
Q&A:
IAN MILLER ON ZOOS, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND THE QUAD THE HISTORIAN AND CABOT HOUSE FACULTY DEAN Ian J. Miller sat down to discuss his research on empire and energy in modern Japan and East Asia and life as a faculty dean. “When you stand somewhere else, you look at the world through someone else’s eyes or you work with historical documents, reading into those powerful texts, it can be empowering,” he says. BY MAYA M.F. WILSON
FM: I know you both really love animals, and you have a few pets at home. IJM: There’s Sadie over there! Hi sweetie! Yeah! You doing okay? FM: This is perhaps going to be a difficult question for you to answer, but I wonder if you have a favorite pet?
IJM: Zoos are microcosms of empire! They’re fascinating. They are diverse, rich with contradictions, and they are fundamentally acts of acquisition and violence.
IJM: No favorite pets, it depends on the day! Crate, when we were younger, was a cat person, and I was a dog person. And both of us have come to love the other. Our first cat was named Gus. Gus was a huge Maine Coon cat and he would sit on your chest and purr and lick your nose. And our first dog was actually Sadie, and we got Sadie in the year I was coming up for tenure at Harvard University.
Part of why I’m an academic, and a historian and intellectual is I love to be surprised by new ideas and new ways of seeing the world.
FM: What’s your favorite part about being Cabot faculty dean? IJM: That’s easy. The students. Our students are remarkable, they are bright, they are caring, they are kind, they are deeply motivated. My wife and I are proud to be deans of Cabot. We’re not the fanciest house on campus. But our house is full of remarkable staff, from our building manager and resident dean and house administrator, academic coordinator, to the HUDS staff, to our janitorial staff, to the groundskeeping staff, to the folks
We loved the place, Earlham was a powerful influence on both of us. We met that first day. We didn’t start dating immediately. We flirted a little our first semester of freshman year, and we began dating really our senior year.
College must be a place for fun, and it needs to be a place where you can make mistakes. And it’s okay.
FM: Your first book, “The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo,” is about Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo, which was the first modern zoo in East Asia. What do you find to be the connection between empire, colonialism, and zoos?
So, who would have thought? You know, a book about a zoo, and then I ended up at Harvard University.
IJM: We first met each other on the first day of college, on our freshman living learning dorm hall, at a place called Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, a small Quaker liberal arts school that we chose because it was full of wonderfully curious, quirky people who wanted to change the world.
On New Year’s Eve of our senior year, as the clock chimed midnight, I first kissed Crate Herbert, who became my wife. She is wonderful. I adore her. I feel very lucky that we’ve been together 30 years or more, and we’ve been married more than 25 years. It’s one of the great gifts of my life. That doesn’t have to go in print, it’s just true.
CRIMSON MAGAZINE ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Part of why I’m an academic, and a historian and intellectual is I love to be surprised by new ideas and new ways of seeing the world.
I love nature, I love being outside, I am a happy owner of two wonderful cats, one of them’s deaf, the other one has no teeth, and a dog named Sadie who has the world’s biggest underbite. I really love the animal world, and the kind of fecund, remarkable reality of the natural world, so that might have been part of what brought me to the topic. But then, the recognition that this place I used to go for fun was in fact a showcase of empire, a mechanism in the 19th century for demarcating and instantiating and embodying the crucial separation, in those terms, between what it meant to be human and what is meant to be animal, in the high age of Social Darwinist thought — when the separation between humans and animals was often synonymous or understood to be synonymous with the division between colonized and colonizer.
FM: How did you and Crate meet?
It is a very difficult period of life, and I thought, you know what? I’m finally going to get a dog. FM: Any advice you’d like to give to the students reading this article? IJM: “ Oh that’s a really great question. It’s going to be really trite and cheesy, but I genuinely mean this. People don’t arrive at Harvard by accident. College must be a place for fun, and it needs to be a place where you can make mistakes. And it’s okay. This environment is meant to be a place where you screw up. COURTESY OF IAN J. MILLER
who care for the HVAC and keep the water running in the house. I can’t name these folks clearly enough. They are remarkable and they’re here out of acts of caring for students. I always hope that our students recognize that with a sense of gratitude. It’s humbling.
the best possibilities of this place at a time when women were not understood to be sufficient to the demands of a Harvard education. How ridiculous is that? We are one of three houses that claims that legacy of demonstrating the absurdity of the bigotry and misogyny behind that.
just hanging out. The lawn is amazing.
FM: What would you say, apart from the students, is your favorite part about the Quad, more generally?
As a historian, nothing makes me prouder.
FM: You mentioned on your personal website that one of your academic interests is comparative imperialism. How do you compare imperialisms?
IJM: Oh, the Quad! Its rich history as a site of contestation, resistance, inclusion, and belonging. I taught a course last semester called Quad Lab, and we rewrote the title to be “ReWriting the History of Harvard and Radcliffe.” We had a brilliant TF, Hazim Hardaman, and a collection of 12 incredibly sharp, motivated undergraduates. We looked into the history of the Quad as a site of really embodying
FM: In terms of the physical space? IJM: One thing I love about the Quad is that there are three houses! We share a sense of identity in that retreat. We’re Harvard’s backyard. Right now the Quad lawn, which is right out this window, is full of undergraduates. There’s someone throwing a frisbee, there are three or four puppies running around, there’s a couple dozen students sunbathing, chilling out, studying and
The Quad lets you let your guard down, lets you just be yourself, a little more than other parts of campus just by simple fact of its history and its location.
IJM: I would say comparative imperialisms, always plural. I find that pluralizing these complex terms, simply adding an “s” to any complicated term, allows us to think with nuance. And in my case what it allows us to do is move into the past, and into the past tense. We must reconcile and reckon with the past, using the archives and the materials that are available to us.
That’s how we learn, and that’s really hard for our students, I find. That’s part of why I love the house system. The houses are a place you can be yourself, and you can blow it, and it’s okay. You’re a member of Cabot House no matter what.
FM Fifteen Minutes is the magazine of The Harvard Crimson. To read the full interview and other longform pieces, visit THECRIMSON.COM/ MAGAZINE
