Join us for this year’s 8th Annual Burge Lecture “Illumination and its Discontents: Electricity Theft and the Political Economy of Japanese Energy” with guest lecturer Dr. Ian Miller, Professor of History at Harvard University.
How did the world’s third-largest economy, Japan, become addicted to fossil fuels? The first non-Western nation to industrialize—a process driven by calories from coal and calories from bodies—the country now imports 97% of its primary energy and is home to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, site of three partial core meltdowns. This talk takes us back to the dawn of the energy-intensive culture that we now call “modernity,” tracing the emergence of new attitudes towards electrical power and tracking the development of a political economy that has colonized the climate. Our focus will be tight: the streets of Yokohama and Tokyo at the beginning of the twentieth century. This presentation builds on Miller’s work as a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow.
Date: Thursday, March 29, 2018
Pre-event Reception: 5:00pm – 6:30pm
Lecture: 6:30pm
Location: Robert H. Lee Alumni Centre, 6163 University Blvd.
Cost: Free (with RSVP)
RSVP at: https://
Organized by the UBC History Graduate Student Association, the Burge Lecture is an annual endowed lecture made possible by a generous donation from UBC alumnus William Burge. The Burge Lecture series provides students, faculty, alumni and community members the opportunity to connect with historians and scholars engaged in exciting research.
This year’s Burge Lecture is presented as part of the Meiji at 150 Lecture Series, generously supported by the Consulate-General of Japan in Vancouver and hosted by the Centre for Japanese Research – CJR at UBC, the Department of History, and UBC Asian Studies. For more, see: meijiat150.arts.ubc.ca.