Drisana Misra

Overview

Drisana Misra studies early modern Japan and its transregional connections with the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her research takes an interdisciplinary approach to excavate traditionally obscured routes of transregional exchange, revealing the manifold ways in which Japanese and New World chroniclers, mapmakers, and artists participated in knowledge creation. Her work also examines Japanese literary and visual engagement with foreign realms, objects, and knowledges during the Edo period (1603–1868).

She is completing her first book, Imaginaries of Amer-Asia: Early Modern Japan and the ‘New World,’ which traces the emergence of an Amer-Asian spatiality in the northern Pacific during the Nanban period (c. 1543–1641) and its later reception in the mid-to-late Tokugawa period. Developing comparative, decolonizing methodologies in conversation with scholars of early colonial Latin America, the book explores how the “worlding” of the world can be reformulated through a vast network of non-European and indigenous knowledge transfers.

Her second research project turns to the oceans that connected early modern Japan to the wider world, examining how currents and marine life shaped the making and circulation of objects, particularly those classed as Nanban-mono南蛮物, or “southern barbarian things.” She is also principal investigator of Parsed Cargoes, a critical digital catalogue of Nanban folding screens developed with co-investigator Prof. Nabeel Siddiqui of Susquehanna University. 

At Cornell, she teaches courses on early modern Japan that follow the circulation of scientific ideas, technologies, and geographic knowledge during the so-called “age of discovery,” and that examine the Tokugawa world through its “four gateways” of Nagasaki, Tsushima, Matsumae, and Satsuma, which served as interfaces with foreign knowledge systems. In Spring 2027, she will teach a course that approaches the samurai through intellectual history and material culture, as well as a seminar on the Japanese diaspora, craft knowledge, and the port cities of the Indo-Pacific that will integrate relevant objects from the collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.

She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 2023, where her dissertation won the Marston Anderson Prize for the best dissertation in East Asian Studies. Before joining the Cornell faculty in 2024, she was a Provost New Faculty Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell. Her research has been supported by a Fulbright-IIE Graduate Research Fellowship at the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo.

Research Focus

• Early Modern Japanese History and Literature
• Nanban Material Culture
• Critical Cartography
• Intellectual History
• Human-Animal and Oceanic Studies
• Early Colonial Latin American Art and Literature
• Decolonial Theory