Kären Wigen
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Kären Esther Wigen (born December 29, 1958) is an American historian, geographer, author and educator. She is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of history at
Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
.


Early life and education

Wigen was born in East Lansing, Michigan and grew up in Ohio. Her father was a physicist. When she was thirteen, Wigen's father was invited to work for six months in Japan. The family moved with him and stayed in
Kobe Kobe ( , ; officially , ) is the capital city of Hyōgo Prefecture Japan. With a population around 1.5 million, Kobe is Japan's seventh-largest city and the third-largest port city after Tokyo and Yokohama. It is located in Kansai region, whic ...
. Wigen and her two sisters started studying Japanese at a local Canadian school. At the age of sixteen, she moved back to Japan during her senior year of high school. Her final year of secondary education was spent at Seikyo Gakuin High School in the city of
Kawachinagano is a city located in Osaka Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 101,649 in 47493 households and a population density of 930 persons per km². The total area of the city is . Geography Kawachinagano is located in the sout ...
in western Japan. She graduated from the University of Michigan in 1980, where she studied
Japanese literature Japanese literature throughout most of its history has been influenced by cultural contact with neighboring Asian literatures, most notably China and its literature. Early texts were often written in pure Classical Chinese or , a Chinese-Japanes ...
. Her undergraduate thesis, a translation of Shotaro Yasuoka's ''"A View by the Sea,"'' was published by Columbia University Press in 1984 and won the Japan-US Friendship Society Translation Award. Wigen earned her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley in geography in 1990.


Career

Wigen taught at
Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...
beginning in 1990. As of 2023, she is Frances and Charles Field Professor of History,
Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
. She specializes in East Asia, and she teaches Japanese history and history of cartography. Wigen collaborated on projects with the David Rumsey Map Center, located in Stanford's Green Library, which opened for public in April 2016. The center showcases a collection of 150,000 maps donated by real-estate developer and map collector
David Rumsey David Rumsey (born 1944) is an American map collector and the founder of the David Rumsey Map Collection. He is also the president of Cartography Associates. Rumsey has a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University and was ...
. Accumulated over 40 years, the diverse collection includes atlases, globes, and children's maps, with a particular focus on North and South America. In a statement to the
Stanford Daily ''The Stanford Daily'' is the student-run, independent daily newspaper serving Stanford University. ''The Daily'' is distributed throughout campus and the surrounding community of Palo Alto, California, United States. It has published since the U ...
, Wigen said: "The center addresses one of the key concerns of historians in the computer age: How are we going to make sure key materials survive?"


Works

Wigen's first book, ''The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920'' (1995), explores the Ina Valley of southern
Nagano Prefecture is a landlocked prefecture of Japan located in the Chūbu region of Honshū. Nagano Prefecture has a population of 2,052,493 () and has a geographic area of . Nagano Prefecture borders Niigata Prefecture to the north, Gunma Prefecture to the ...
in Japan and how the silk industry transformed it. She argues that the processes that generated these changes, especially local industrial development and political centralization, contributed to Japan's rise to imperial power. ''The Making of Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920'' won the 1992
John K. Fairbank Prize The John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History is offered annually for an outstanding book in the history of China proper, Vietnam, Chinese Central Asia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, or Japan, substantially after 1800. It honors the late John K. ...
of the American Historical Association. Her second book, '' The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography'' (1997), co-authored with Martin Lewis, explains why the present system of classifying certain landmasses as "continents" is comparatively recent and derived more from historical accident and political concerns than from natural geographical features. Wigen examined Nagano prefecture as a whole in her third book,, ''A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912'' (2010), which explores the roles of cartography, chorography, and regionalism. ''A Malleable Map'', wrote one reviewer, examines how "protoindustrial enterprises" such as sericulture and papercraft appeared on maps and reflected larger economic and political changes over roughly four centuries from the Tokugawa period through the Meiji period. Wigen focuses on how the relationship between regional and national identities "played an integral role in the creation of modern Japan". She argues that the pictorial and nonpictorial ways in which the geographical location of Shinano was shown redefined the ways in which people conceived of the place. These ways were "malleable" because they changed according to the needs and priorities of Tokugawa shoguns, merchants, Meiji officials, travelers, and scholars. In April 2015, she delivered the
Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures The Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures is a series of lectures at Harvard University sponsored by the John King Fairbank Center established in 1986 to be given annually in memory of Edwin O. Reischauer. The lectures are then published by Harvard Unive ...
at Harvard University on the topic "Where in the World? Mapmaking at the Asia-Pacific Margin, 1600-1900." As an editor, Wigen worked on scholarly books on the history of Japan, cartographic history, and global maritime history. These include ''Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges'' (co-editor with
Jerry H. Bentley Jerry Harrell Bentley (December 12, 1949 – July 15, 2012) was an American academic and professor of world history. He was a founding editor of the ''Journal of World History'' since 1990. He wrote on the cultural history of early modern Europe an ...
and Renate Bridenthal), ''Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps'' (co-edited with Fumiko Sugimoto and Cary Karacas), and ''Time in Maps: From the Early Modern Era to our Digital Age'' (co-edited with Caroline Winterer). Cartographic Japan won the
Choice Outstanding Academic Titles Choice Outstanding Academic Titles, formerly Outstanding Academic Books, is a booklist curated by editors working with Choice Reviews, a publishing unit of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). According to the American Library A ...
award from the
Association of College and Research Libraries The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association, is a professional association of academic librarians and other interested individuals. It is dedicated to enhancing the ability of academi ...
.


List of major publications


Books

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As an editor

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Personal life

Wigen married Martin W. Lewis on August 13, 1983. They collaborated on the 1997 book, ''The Myth of Continents'' among other endeavors.


References


External links


Wigen, Kären 1958-
WorldCat Authority Page. {{DEFAULTSORT:Wigen, Karen 1958 births Stanford University faculty American geographers Living people University of Michigan alumni