Rate My Professor fabian drixler

Fabian Drixler is Professor of History at Yale University, where he teaches Japanese history. He earned his PhD from Harvard University in 2008, with a dissertation titled Infanticide and Fertility in Eastern Japan: Discourse and Demography, 1660-1880. This study charts the rise and destruction of a premodern society in which couples raised only two to three children. Highlighting the role of contingency and individual agency in demographic history, it connects population patterns with changing understandings of human life, political space, and the nature of time. Drixler is particularly interested in cultural history and historical demography of Japan and around the world. His research focuses on Tokugawa and Meiji Japan, including demographic, social, and cultural history; infanticide and its ethical underpinnings; stillbirths and the state in modern Japan; Buddhist networks and internal migration; and the history of sustainability, famine, and risk management in early modern Japan. Additional interests encompass climate and Japanese and East Asian environmental history.

Drixler's book Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660-1950 (University of California Press, 2013), a development of his dissertation, received the John Whitney Hall Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. Key articles include 'Hidden in Plain Sight: Stillbirths and Infanticides in Imperial Japan' (Journal of Economic History, 2016) and 'Façade Fictions: False Statistics and Spheres of Autonomy in Meiji Japan,' co-authored with Reo Matsuzaki (Politics and Society, 2024). He serves as Chair of the Council on East Asian Studies and leads the Digital Tokugawa Lab, a Yale-based interdisciplinary team employing GIS methods to map daimyo domains and analyze historical data from Tokugawa Japan. As affiliate faculty in East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Yale Program in Environmental Humanities, Drixler contributes to diverse academic initiatives. He is currently on leave for Fall 2025. Through his work, Drixler illuminates the interplay of culture, demography, and environment in shaping Japanese history.