Arron O'Connor

DPhil Candidate in History

I am a historian of Japan’s nineteenth century, interested in the longevity of supposedly pre-modern cultural and intellectual practices across the Meiji Ishin (commonly translated into English as Meiji Restoration). In particular, I work on excavating the historical consciousness of common people in Edo/Tokyo in order to problematize chronologies imposed upon the history of Japan.

This work builds upon my MPhil research which examined the social and intellectual history of consumption and readership in nineteenth-century Japan. I examined how playful fakes, forgeries and counterfeits in the literary scene of the mid-nineteenth reveal a conception of the past that was co-eval with the present, allowing for the co-existence of temporalities. In such a way, this literature undermined absolute time and existed in a space appositional to the authority embedded in such systems as rely upon straightforward chronology. I situated this discussion in the printing and publishing practices of 1830s Edo, with a particular focus on Ryūtei Tanehiko’s gōkan, Nise Murasaki inaka Genji.

I received my BA in English Language and Literature and my MPhil in Japanese Studies from the University of Oxford, in between which I worked as an Outreach Officer for three years at one of the University’s colleges. I am currently pursuing my DPhil in History at Wolfson College with the generous support of the Sasakawa Scholarship.

Supervisor: Sho Konishi 

Research Interests:

19th century social and intellectual history

Material and media consumption in late-Tokugawa Japan

Edo publishing practices and culture