Charles SCHENCKING
Honorary Professor
Public Orator
Deputy Chair, Human Research Ethics Committee
Charles Schencking is a historian of modern Japan who has published widely on the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, the Japanese navy, natural hazards, Japanese-American relations, and war, state, and society. His research and teaching is heavily influenced by exploring the interplay between politics, technology, environment, and society.
Before joining the University of Hong Kong, he was an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University, and a Yasuda Banking and Trust fellow. He has held distinguished visiting appointments at the University of Tokyo, Rikkyō University, the University of Kyoto, and Murdoch University.
Over the course of his career, Charles has secured generous research funding from the British Academy, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Australian Research Council, the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, and the Japan Foundation. History is the discipline that best enables Charles to better understand humanity. He strives to convey this through his teaching and research.
Room 10.11, Run Run Shaw Tower
EDUCATION
BA, Western Washington University
MA, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
PhD, University of Cambridge
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Modern Japanese History
Natural Disasters
Japanese Navy
Japanese-American Relations
Books
Columbia University Press
2013
Making Waves: Politics, Propaganda, and the Emergence of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1868–1922
Stanford University Press
2005
The US and the War in the Pacific, 1941–1945
Routledge
2022
兴风作浪 : 政治、宣传与日本帝国海军的崛起
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BOOK AWARDS
COURSES TAUGHT
- HIST2105, The Rise of Modern Japan, 1830-1950s
- HIST2106, Imperial Japan: Its Modern Wars and Colonial Empire
- HIST2107, The Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, 1931-1952
- HIST2123, Meiji Japan: Challenges and Transformations, 1853-1912
- HIST2124, Taishō and Shōwa Japan: Perfecting state, society, and nation, 1912-1989
- HIST2162, Saving the world: A history of global humanitarianism
- HIST2174, Hell in the pacific: The Japan-America War and its legacies today
- HIST2186, Death and Destruction from Above: A History of Aerial Bombing, from Zeppelins to Drones
- HIST3027, Natural Disasters in History, 1700-2009
- HIST4032, Great Kantō Earthquake and the Reconstruction of Tokyo
- HIST4036, World War III: A History
- CCHU9004, Catastrophes, Cultures, and the Angry Earth
FELLOWSHIPS & GRANTS
- Sir Walter Murdoch Distinguished Visiting Professor, Murdoch University, 2019-21.
- Japan Foundation Fellow, 2018-19.
- British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolfson College, Cambridge University
- Yasuda Banking and Trust Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolfson College, Cambridge University
EXTERNAL AFFILIATIONS
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles. “Acts of Humanity, Expectations of Returns: Corporate Giving from
- America’s Industrial Heartland Following the Great Kantō Earthquake,” The Asia Pacific
- Journal – Japan Focus, 21:8 (August 2023): 1-14.
- Wilson, Sandra, Michael Sturma, Argun Subrahmanyan, Dean Askielowicz, J. Charles SCHENCKING. The US and the War in the Pacific, 1941-1945. New York: Routledge, 2022. ISBN-10: 0367547589.
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles. “Generosity Betrayed: Pearl Harbor and American Humanitarian Assistance to Japan in 1923.” Pacific Historical Review, 91:1 (January 2022): 66-103.
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles and BORLAND, Janet. “Objects of Concern, Ambassadors of Gratitude: Children, Humanitarianism, and Transpacific Diplomacy following Japan’s 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 13:2 (Spring 2020): 195-225.
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles. “Giving Most and Giving Differently: Humanitarianism as Diplomacy Following Japan’s 1923 Earthquake.” Diplomatic History, 43:4 (September 2019): 729-757.
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles. “Mapping Death and Destruction in 1923,” in Karen Wigen, Sugimoto Fumiko, and Cary Karacas, eds., Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016): 155-158.
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles. “The Imperial Japanese Navy and the First World War: Unprecedented Opportunities and Harsh Realities,” in Tosh Minohara, Tze-ki Hon, and Evan Dawley, eds., The Decade of the Great War: Japan and the Wider World in the 1910s (Leiden: Brill, 2014): 83-106.
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles. The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. ISBN-10: 0231162189; ISBN-13: 978-0231162180.
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles. “1923 Tokyo as a Devastated War and Occupation Zone: The Catastrophe One Confronted in Post Earthquake Japan,” Japanese Studies, 29:1 (May 2009): 111-129.
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles. “The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Culture of Catastrophe and Reconstruction in 1920s Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies, 34:2 (Summer 2008): 295-331.
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles. “The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 and the Japanese Nation: Responding to an Urban Calamity of an Unprecedented Nature,” Education About Asia, 12:2 (Fall 2007): 20-25. **Special issue on Natural Disasters in Asia**
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles. “Catastrophe, Opportunism, Contestation: The Fractured Politics of Reconstructing Tokyo following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923,” Modern Asian Studies, 40:4 (October 2006): 833-874.
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles. Making Waves: Politics, Propaganda, and the Emergence of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1868-1922. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. ISBN-10: 0804749779.
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles. “Interservice Rivalry and Politics in Post-War Japan,” in John Steinberg et. al., The Russo-Japanese War in a Global Perspective: World War Zero (London: Brill, 2005): 565-580.
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles. “Navalism, Naval Expansion, and War: The Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the Japanese Navy, 1902-1922,” in Philips O’Brien, ed., The Anglo-Japanese Alliance (London: Routledge, 2004): 122-139.
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles. “The Politics of Pragmatism and Pageantry: Selling the Navy at the Elite and Local Level in Japan, 1890-1913,” in Sandra Wilson, ed., Nation and Nationalism in Japan (London: Routledge/Curzon, 2002): 21-37.
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles. “The Imperial Japanese Navy and the Constructed Consciousness of a South Seas Destiny, 1872-1921,” Modern Asian Studies, 33:4 (October 1999): 769-796.
- SCHENCKING, J. Charles. “Bureaucratic Politics, Military Budgets, and Japan’s Southern Advance: The Imperial Navy’s Seizure of German Micronesia in World War I,” War in History, 5:3 (July 1998): 308-326.
- Scawthorn, Charles, Nishino Tomoaki, SCHENCKING, J. Charles, and Borland, Janet. “Kantō Daikasai: The Great Kantō Fire following the 1923 Earthquake,” Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 113:5 (October 2023): 1902-1923.