Rate My Professor Brian Platt

Brian Platt is Associate Professor of History in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, where he specializes in Japanese history with a focus on the 18th and 19th centuries. His academic interests encompass World History with emphasis on Japan and East Asia, as well as themes of modernization, memory, gender, and national identity. Platt received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998. Throughout his career, he has held significant administrative roles, including Chair of the Department of History and Art History and Director of the Digital Public Humanities Graduate Certificate Program. He has been recognized with grants and fellowships from prestigious organizations such as the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, the National Academy of Education, and the Association for Asian Studies.

Platt's scholarly contributions include the monograph Burning and Building: Schooling and State Formation in Japan, 1750-1890 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), which examines the interplay between local schooling initiatives and state-building efforts in late Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan. Recent publications feature “Popular Education in Tokugawa Japan” in The Tokugawa World (Routledge, 2021), “Farmer-Soldiers and Local Leadership in 19th-century Japan” in The Meiji Restoration: Japan as a Global Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and “Imperialism and Civil War in mid-19th Century East Asia” in The American Civil War in Global Context (Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission, 2015). His ongoing research projects include the book manuscript “Wind, Worms and Weeds: Rescuing the Eroding Past in Early Modern Japan” and articles such as “From Memory to History, via Archaeology: The Life of an Ancient Monument in Tokugawa-era Japan” and “Early Modernity and Historical Consciousness in Japan.” Platt teaches a range of courses including Introduction to World History, Premodern East Asia, Modern Japan, Postwar Japan, Gender in Japanese History, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki in History and Memory. He has presented at conferences like Wake Forest University’s “The Civil Wars of the Meiji Restoration” and delivered invited lectures at the University of Kyoto’s International Institute for Japanese Studies and Keio University. Platt supervises graduate dissertations, including J. Clarke Bursley’s “From Moral Education to National Mobilization: The Imperial Japanese Army’s Campaigns to Shape Japan, 1872–1944” (2026).