Morgan Pitelka
Associate Professor of Asian Studies (3252); Adjunct Associate Professor of History (3291)
New West 319
Campus Box 3267
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
919-843-7353 (phone)
919-843-7817 (fax)
mpitelka@unc.edu
B.A. Oberlin College, 1994
M.A. Princeton University
Ph.D. Princeton University, 2001
Research And Teaching Interests
I am an Associate Professor in the Asian Studies Department, affiliated with the History Department, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I teach Asian Studies courses in premodern Japanese history and culture, and advise graduate students in the History Department with interests in medieval and early modern Japan, material culture, and other issues in Asian history. I am also the Director of the Triangle Center for Japanese Studies, a collaboration of Duke University, North Carolina State University, and UNC-Chapel Hill.
Publications And Writing
Online:
Books:
- Tokugawa (forthcoming), a study of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the long sixteenth century, material culture, and the relationship between historiography and hagiography in Japanese history and museum display
- What’s the Use of Art? Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context (University of Hawaii Press, December 2007), edited by Jan Mrazek and Morgan Pitelka
- Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons, and Tea Practitioners in Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2005), nominated for the John Whitney Hall Book Prize and the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History
- Japanese Tea Culture: Art, History, and Practice (Routledge, 2003), editor and author (issued in 2007 in paperback)
Articles:
- “Art, Agency, and Networks in the Career of Tokugawa Ieyasu,” Blackwell Companion to Asian Art, ed., Deborah Hutton and Rebecca Brown (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
- “The Empire of Things: Tokugawa Ieyasu’s Material Legacy and Cultural Profile,” Japanese Studies 29:1 (May, 2009)
- “Introduction to the Early Modern Warrior Experience,” Early Modern Japan 16 (2008)
- “A Raku Wastewater Container and the Problem of Monolithic Sincerity,” Impressions 30 (2008)
- “Back to the Fundamentals: ‘Reproducing’ Rikyu and Chojiro in Japanese Tea Culture,” in Rupert Cox, ed., The Culture of Copying in Japan: Critical and Historical Perspectives (Routledge, September 2007)
- “Tea Taste: Patronage and Collaboration among Tea Masters and Potters in Early Modern Japan,” Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Fall, 2004)
- “Sadô ni okeru ‘tezukuri’ no imi,” [The Meaning of the “Handmade” in Tea Culture], Kumakura Isao, ed., Yûgei bunka to dentô [The Culture and Tradition of the Arts of Play] (Yoshikawa bunko, 2003)
- “Kinsei ni okeru rakuyaki dentô no keisei,” [The Structure of Tradition in Early Modern Raku Ceramics] Nomura bijutsukan kiyô (Spring, 2000)
Current research (in progress):
- Writing a book titled Sixteenth-Century Losers on the material culture, daily life, and destruction of Ichijodani, a castle town active in japan’s long sixteenth century
- Writing a book titled The Politics of Time in Seventeenth-Century Kyoto on the cultural practices and products of tea masters, aristocrats, and elite urban commoners in the imperial capital after the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in Edo
Web articles:
- Morgan Pitelka, “The Three Legged Stool: A Primer on Planning, Conducting, and Writing Major Research Projects” (pdf)
- Morgan Pitelka, “Unearthing Ceramic Histories in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Japan: Sources, Themes, and Methods” (html)
- Morgan Pitelka, “Japanese Ceramics Terminology” (html)
- Andrew Maske, “Takatori Ceramics” (html)