- Email:
- cornell@iu.edu
Education
- PhD, The Johns Hopkins University, 1981
Research Interests
- Sociology of Japan
- East Asian social and historical demographies
Awards and Distinctions
- Chancellor's Service-Learning Fellowship for the Enhancement of Teaching at IU, 2000-01
- National Science Foundation Research Grant, 1990-93
- Japan Foundation Professional Fellowship, 1989
Publication Highlights
- "Infanticide in Early Modern Japan? Demography, Culture, and Population Growth." Journal of Asian Studies 55 (1):22-50, 1996
- "The Deaths of Old Women" Folklore and Mortality in Nineteenth Century Japan" In Recreating the Japanese Woman: 1800-1945 (ed.) Gail Bernstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
- Was "Three-and'a-half Lines' So Bad? Peasant Women and Divorce in Early Modern Japan." Signs, 15(4):710-732, 1990.
By training I am a demographer and landscape architect. During the first half of my career I focused on the population history of Japan in the early modern period (1603-1868). I wrote a number of articles on the roles of women and men, family relationships, birth, marriage, and death, household structure, and research methods. Since 1997 I have been pursuing graduate work in landscape architecture. Even with my new work, I expect Japan to continue to be a focus of interest. At present, I am considering how nuclear waste sites can be marked for durations of 1000, 10000, or 100000 years. As part of this work, I am analyzing the history of landform creation in Japan over the past 2000 years to determine how the construction of sites by cut, fill, or some combination of techniques enhances their endurance or disappearance.