The Japan Studies Program is excited to welcome Mark Metzler to the University of Washington. Metzler joins the program as a professor with a joint appointment in the Department of History and in the Jackson School. Metzler earned his BA in international relations from Stanford University, his MA in comparative social history from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his PhD in history (East Asia/Japan) from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
Metzler first became interested in Japan in the 1980s, when he was working at Apple Computer’s Macintosh Division. Apple offered conversational Japanese classes to employees, and he jumped at the chance to learn. These classes sparked his deep interest in Japan and eventually led him back to graduate school in 1989. His MA thesis on economic boom-and-bust cycles over the long run of Japanese history was completed in 1989, just as the Japanese bubble was reaching its height, and in one way or another he has been working on this topic ever since.
He is currently completing a global history of deflation and depression in the world of the late nineteenth century. He is also working on a study of Japan’s post-bubble deflation in a long historical perspective, reaching back to the Tokugawa period. His most recent book is the coauthored Central Banks and Gold: How Tokyo, London, and New York Shaped the Modern World and will be released in December 2016 by Cornell University Press.
Although Metzler begins teaching at the UW in autumn quarter 2017, and is looking forward to teaching UW students on the history of Japan, Japanese political economy, and the history of globalization, he will make his UW faculty debut as the featured speaker for the Griffith and Patricia Way Lecture on April 3, 2017, at 7 PM when he will present on Japan’s post-bubble deflation. Look for details on our website closer to the date.