Mark T. McNally

Professor & Interim Department Chair
Japan

Office: Sakamaki B201
Phone: (808) 956-6759
Email: mmcnally@hawaii.edu

BA Pomona, 1990; MA, PhD UCLA, 1995, 1998

Background

Mark McNally received his BA degree from Pomona College in Asian Studies (1990) and his MA and PhD degrees in History from UCLA (1995, 1998). He spent three years in Nagoya as a participant in the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program (1990-1993). He has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University (1999-2000) and a Foreign Research Scholar at Tokyo University’s Historiographical Institute (2005). In 2008, he was the Erwin von Baelz Guest Professor at the Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen (Germany). He has been a recipient of various grants and fellowships, including a Fulbright fellowship. His research interests are primarily in early modern Japanese social and intellectual history, including Confucianism and Kokugaku. He is currently writing a monograph on the Ryūkyū Kingdom and early modern Japan.

Representative Publications

• Like No Other: Exceptionalism and Nativism in Early Modern Japan (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2016).
• “A King’s Legitimacy and a Kingdom’s Exceptionality: Ryūkyū’s Bankoku Shinryō no Kane of 1458,” International Journal of Okinawan Studies, vol. 6 (Dec. 2015): 87-103.
• “Who Speaks for Norinaga? Determining Succession in Nineteenth-Century Kokugaku,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies (Volume 38, Number 1, 2011, pp. 129-159).
• Proving the Way: Conflict and Practice in the History of Japanese Nativism (Harvard University Asia Center, 2005).
• “On a Dream and a Prayer: Hirata Atsutane, Evidential Learning, and the Afterlife,” in Practicing the Afterlife (Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2004).
• “The Sandaikō Debate,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 29:3/4 (2002).
• “Intellectual Polarities and the Norinaga School ‘Field’: Hirata Atsutane and the Nudenoya, 1823-1834,” Early Modern Japan, an Interdisciplinary Journal 9:2 (2001).