Robert Hellyer

Professor

3367583955

hellyer@wfu.edu

Tribble B-12

CV

Bio

Robert Hellyer grew up in Tacoma, Washington and first developed an interest in Japanese history while teaching in Yamaguchi prefecture as a member of the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program.  He later served on the faculty of The University of Tokyo, taught at Allegheny College, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University before coming to Wake Forest.

He teaches courses on Japan, East Asia, and world social and economic history. In addition, he has worked with Wake Forest alumni who majored in History to identify ways to highlight the professional skills gained in undergraduate History courses, strategies detailed in an article in The History Teacher.

A historian of early modern and modern Japan, Professor Hellyer has explored foreign relations from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, research presented in a monograph, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640-1868  (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009) and in several journal articles and book chapters.  He also researched Japan’s role in the global tea trade of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a project for which he received Smithsonian, Japan Foundation, Hakuhodo Foundation, Sainsbury Institute, and NEH fellowships to support research in Britain, Japan and the United States. That research culminated in the monograph,  Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups. Columbia University Press, 2021.

In addition, he co-organized a multi-year research project involving historians in North America, Europe, Japan, and East Asia that examined Japan’s Meiji Restoration in advance of the 150-year anniversary in 2018 which resulted in several articles and Robert Hellyer and Harald Fuess, eds., The Meiji Restoration: Japan as a Global Nation. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

He also co-edited, with Robert Fletcher, Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia: Lives, Linkages, and Imperial Connections. SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan. Bloomsbury, 2022.

Background

Education
B.A.   Claremont McKenna College
M.A.   Stanford University
Ph.D.  Stanford University

Academic Appointments
Wake Forest University, Assistant Professor of History (2005-2011), Associate Professor (2011-2021), Professor (2022- ); Coordinator of East Asian Studies Interdisciplinary Minor (2013-2023)
Allegheny College, Assistant Professor of History (2001-2005)
Keio University, Visiting Assistant Professor, Faculty of Economics (June 2009-January 2010)
University of Tokyo, Faculty Research Associate (assistant professor) (1998-2000)

Research Fellowships & Positions  
Visiting Fellow, International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) (July 2017 to August 2o18)
Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow, Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (Summer 2014)
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Newberry Library, Chicago (August 2012-August 2013)
Visiting Researcher, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, University of Tokyo (Summer 2011)
Visiting Researcher (Japan Foundation Fellow), Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo (August 2007-August 2008)
Postdoctoral Fellow, Freer & Sackler Galleries and National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution (Summer 2007)
Postdoctoral Fellow, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University (September 2004-June 2005)