Dr. Noell Wilson is Executive Director of the Croft Institute for International Studies and Croft Associate Professor of History and International Studies in the Department of History at the University of Mississippi.
Research Interests
Dr. Noell Wilson is a historian of East Asia and the Pacific with a special interest in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Biography
Dr. 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 19th century Japan into an emergent North Pacific commercial and cultural web. 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
2015, Harvard University Asia Center
The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan
From the publisher:
Defensive Positions focuses on the role of regional domains in early modern Japan's coastal defense, shedding new light on this system's development. This examination, in turn, has significant long-term political implications for the involvement of those domains in Tokugawa state formation. Noell Wilson argues that domainal autonomy in executing maritime defense slowly escalated over the course of the Tokugawa period to the point where the daimyo ultimately challenged Tokugawa authorities as the primary military interface with the outside world. By first exploring localized maritime defense at Nagasaki and then comparing its organization with those of the Yokohama and Hakodate harbors during the treaty port era, Wilson identifies new, core systemic sources for the collapse of the shogunate's control of the monopoly on violence.
Selected Book(s):
Selected Article(s):
“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.
Courses Taught
- HIST 1800 Intro to East Asian History
- HIST 3000 Historical Methods
- HIST 3870 Modern Japanese History
- HIST 3890 History of Japan-US Relations
- HIST 4710 The Second World War
Education
M.A. East Asian Studies, Harvard University (1997)
Ph.D. History, Harvard University (2004)
B.A. East Asian Studies, Wake Forest University (1994)
Recognitions
- Book Prize, Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, 2018
- Fulbright U.S. Scholar - Japan, Hokkaido University, 2017-2018
Latest News
New director envisions deeper student engagement, global reach and continued academic prestige.
Faculty News
OXFORD, Miss. – Historian Noell Wilson is the new executive director of the Croft Institute for International Studies at the University of Mississippi. Wilson has loved international travel and language learning since childhood and looks forward to fulfilling her passion while helping students do the same.
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Faculty News