Fellow 2021-2022 FABIAN DRIXLER
Fabian Drixler is Professor of History at Yale University, where he specializes in the history of Japan (with a particular fondness for the Tokugawa period) and historical demography (with a particular fascination with fertility and family planning). His research also extends into climate history and historical cartography. Since 2019 he has led the “Digital Tokugawa Lab”.

Its inaugural project brings together expertise in history, linguistics, programming, and GIS to create a continuous set of highly detailed maps of Japan’s feudal territories from about 1600 to 1871.
He has written (and sometimes even published) on the following topics: the flow and ebb of family planning, especially in Japan and in Sri Lanka; fertility rises of the past and the future, cultures of infanticide, population policy, the power of discourses and images to effect demographic change, the surprisingly fraught politics of internal migration in Tokugawa Japan, the emergence of imagined communities of the living and the dead, the invention of more than a million stillbirths in Imperial Japan, the operation of omote-naishō, a political culture that traded performative law-abidance for the autonomy to deviate; the expectation in 1868 that Japan would permanently fracture into Eastlands and Westlands and why these alternative Japanese (nation?) states have been largely forgotten; finally, and most saliently for his time at CAPAS, he has spent the better part of a decade collecting materials about Japan’s volcanic winters of the Little Ice Age and the fractal patterns of mortality they produced.
In this work, he enjoys bringing together different methodologies: close readings of texts, images, and objects; databases of phenomena that can be counted, computed, or mapped; statistical analysis, GIS, and simulations and neural nets when he can convince a friend to do the hard technical work.
One of Fabian’s most cherished professional experiences was curating a museum exhibit that was a history in objects, entitled Samurai and the Culture of Japan’s Great Peace. He also likes to be on the receiving end of efforts to bring expert knowledge to a wider audience; he finds that a good deal of the joy of a life in academia is found by reading and listening beyond one’s narrow specialties; for example, about the non-human world and deep history.
Profile of Fabian Drixler on the web page of Yale University