FIFTEEN QUESTIONS

Ian 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When you stand somewhere else, you look at the world through someone else’s eyes or you work with historical documents, reading into those powerful texts, it can be empowering.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 stu dents, 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.

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: Your first book, “The Na ture of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Im perial Zoo,” is about Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo, which was the first modern zoo in East Asia. What do you find to be the connec tion between empire, colonial ism, and zoos?

IJM: Zoos are microcosms of em pire! They’re fascinating. They are diverse, rich with contradic tions, and they are fundamen tally acts of acquisition and vio lence.

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 mech anism in the 19th cen tury for demarcating and instantiating and embody ing 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.

So, who would have thought? You know, a book about a zoo, and then I ended up at Harvard University.

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