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About Me

I am a social and cultural historian of early modern Japan (1600-1868) who enjoys writing history in different scales, from the very small to the large. In my first book, Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), I worked with the large scale and looked at trends in travel culture spanning two and a half centuries. In the second, The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko: One Woman’s Transit from Tokugawa to Meiji Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), I turned to the small scale and wrote a microhistory centered on the life of an ordinary person who did not change the course of history. (Both books place women at the center.)

Committed to linking Japanese history to global history and to speaking to scholars outside my area of expertise, I am completing a history of the night in early modern Japan that revisits assumptions about Japan’s modernization and about the global transformation of the night.

I teach undergraduate and graduate classes in Japanese History, the History of Tokyo, the Samurai, Japan and the World, Tokugawa Japan, and the Tokugawa-Meiji transition, as well as professionalization seminars for graduate students in all fields.

Recent Publications

Nenzi, L. “Globality Without Mobility: Ephemera, 1830s-1860s.” Journal of World History 35:4 (Dec. 2024): 547-577. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2024.a943173

Nenzi, L. “Print Culture: The Flow of People and Things.” In The New Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 2, edited by D. Howell, 507-536. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108283748

Media Coverage

Social Media

Country Focus

Japan

Expertise by Geography

Japan

Expertise by Chronology

17th century, 18th century, 19th century, Early Modern

Expertise by Topic

Gender, Literary History, Local & Regional, Material Culture, Urban History, Women