Jennifer M. Miller | Fung Public Lecture: 'Our plants and our lands and our homes': U.S.-Japan Competition and Imperial Erasure in the 1980s

Jennifer Miller

Associate Professor of History

Dartmouth College

I am an associate professor of history at Dartmouth College and a historian of the United States and the World, with a focus on the United States and the Asia-Pacific.  My research examines the intersections between foreign policy and domestic ideas, ideologies, and political narratives. It explores how new interactions between America and East Asia after World War II transformed both American and Asian thinking about security, democratic order, citizenship, and economic growth. My first book, entitled Cold War Democracy: The United States and Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), draws from American and Japanese archives to examine how democratic thinking and ideologies changed during World War II and the early Cold War.  It explores how different visions of democracy, both American and Japanese, shaped the U.S.-Japanese relationship. Choice named Cold War Democracy an Outstanding Academic Title for 2019. I also write about the contemporary relevance of the U.S.-Japanese relationship for American understandings of capitalism, globalization, international power, and hegemony. My most recent article explores neoconservative thinking about East Asian growth, the importance of tradition, and the nature of capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s. I have also written about the ways in which Japan’s economic rise in the 1970s and 1980s shaped President Donald Trump’s approach to international trade and globalization. This article was featured in the New York Times and the Washington Post.