International Affairs and Transnational Relations

Washington History Seminar
Historical Perspectives on International and National Affairs

International Affairs and Transnational Relations

Akira Iriya
HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Acclaimed Harvard historian Akira Iriye will reflect on the study of history today, examining recent historiographic trends and phenomena like “motion,” “interconnectedness,” and “hybridity” in an effort to move away from a Euro-centric approach. Iriye will explore the fascination with non-national entities and transnational relations, rather than with more conventional international affairs understood in the geopolitical framework (world hegemony, regional order, balance of power, etc.). The increased importance of transnational relations places non-state actors and non-geopolitical themes, such as economic globalization, cultural exchanges, environmental issues, and human rights, at the forefront of the contemporary study of history. Iriye will argue this has created a more hybrid world, moving away from a geopolitically defined world order and toward a mixture of geopolitics and non-geopolitical phenomena.

Akira Iriye received his B.A. from Haverford College in 1957 and a Ph.D. in U.S. and East Asian History from Harvard in 1961. Professor Iriye was an Instructor and Lecturer in history at Harvard following receipt of his Ph.D, then taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Rochester, and the University of Chicago before accepting an appointment as Professor of History at Harvard University in 1989, where he became Charles Warren Professor of American History in 1991. Professor Iriye has written widely on American diplomatic history and Japanese- American relations. Among those works are Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897-1911 (1972); Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941-1945 (1981); Fifty Years of Japanese-American Relations (in Japanese, 1991); China and Japan in the Global Setting (1992); The Globalizing of America (1993); and Cultural Internationalism an World Order (1997).

Monday September 29, 2014
4:00 p.m. 
Woodrow Wilson Center, 6th Floor Moynihan Board Room
Ronald Reagan Building, Federal Triangle Metro Stop