Noell Wilson

Chair of History and Croft Associate Professor of History & International Studies

• Faculty
• Instructor

• Email:

  nrwilson@olemiss.edu

• Office Location:

  311 Bishop

• Phone:

  662-915-6977

Dr. Noell Wilson is the Chair of the Department of History at the University of Mississippi. She is also an Associate Professor of History and International Studies at Croft.

Research Interests

Dr. Noell Wilson is a historian of East Asia and the Pacific with a special interest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Biography

Wilson is an historian of maritime Japan and the North Pacific. Her first book, Defensive Positions: The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) examined the influence of coastal defense on early modern state formation in Japan and received the 2018 book prize from the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. Author of articles on the Nagasaki defense system, Ainu drift whale practice and Japanese sailor-apprentice programs aboard Western whalers, Wilson’s current research explores the role of US whalers in integrating mid- nineteenth century Japan into an
emergent North Pacific commercial and cultural web. Recipient of numerous awards including the Fulbright (twice), Wilson teaches in the Department of History and at the Croft Institute of International Studies at the University of Mississippi, USA. When not working on her current book project about American whalers in the 19th century North Pacific, Wilson can be found sailing or cycling.

Publications

Books
“The Transformation of Japan’s Northern Border in a Globalizing World: History and Identity at Hokkaido’s Sesquicentennial,” ed. Edward Boyle and Naomi Chi, published in Japanese as「グローバル化する世界における日本の北部国境の変容：北海道150年の歴史とアイデンティティ.」Hokkaido University Press, 2022.

“Precursors of the Japanese Pacific Pivot: Drift Whales, Ainu and the Tokugawa State along the 1850s Okhotsk Arc,” in New Histories of Pacific Whaling: Across Species and Culture, ed. Ryan Tucker Jones and Angela Wanhalla. (University of Hawaii Press, 2022).    

“US Whalers in 1860s Hakodate: How the ‘Nantucket of the North Pacific’Connected Restoration Japan to Global Flows,” invited essay for edited volume, Meiji Restoration in a Global Context, Harald Fuess and Robert Hellyer, eds. (Cambridge University Press, 2019). 

Articles
Defensive Positions: The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan. Harvard University Asia Center, 2015.

Courses Taught

• HST180 Intro to East Asian History
• HST 300 Historical Methods
• HST 387 Modern Japanese History
• HST 389 History of Japan-US Relations
• HST 471 The Second World War