- Phone:
- (812) 855-6951
- Email:
- mortoxen@iu.edu
- Office:
- GA 2001
Education
- Ph.D. in History, University of Copenhagen
Research Interests
- Conflict Studies
- Medieval Japanese Estate System
- Premodern Political, Social, and Environmental History
- Culture of Violence
- Early Modern Japanese Visions of the Medieval Past
Courses Recently Taught
- E337/G357 - Premodern Japanese History
- E352 - Beauty of Violence and War in Medieval Japanese War Tales
- E352 - East Asia Between Mongols and Samurai
- E310 - Introduction to East Asian Studies
- E203 - Samurai Culture
- E100 - Introduction to East Asia
Awards and Fellowships
- New Frontiers of Creativity and Scholarship Award, Arts and Humanities Program, Indiana University (2018)
- Appointed Paul V. McNutt and Kathleen McNutt Watson Professorship in Japanese Studies, Indiana University (2017-2022)
- Mosaic Faculty Fellow (2017)
- Mellon Innovating International Research, Teaching, and Collaboration Award (2016)
- Jacob C. and Lily S. Wu Faculty Support Award (2016)
- IU Trustees Teaching Award (2015)
Publication Highlights
"Mountains, Woodsmen, and Village Conflicts in Japan, ca. 1200–1400." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 84 no. 1, 2024, p. 39-73. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jas.2024.a948860.
Oxenboell, Morten and Inaba Tsuguharu, “The Medieval Peasant Through War and Conflict,” in Tonomura Hitomi (ed.) The New Cambridge History of Japan (accepted, forthcoming)
Oxenboell, Morten, “Soma and Zomia: Agency, Governance, and ‘Shatter Zones’ in Medieval Japan,” in Ian Forrest (ed.) Zomia (accepted, forthcoming)
"Bandits and Peasants in Medieval Japan," in Gordon, Kaeupper and Zurndorfer (eds.) The Cambridge World History of Violence, vol 2, 2020, pp. 207-227.
- Akutō: Rural Conflicts in Medieval Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press (2018).
- “Epistemologies of Violence: The Medieval Japanese War Tales,” History and Theory, vol. 56:4, 2017: pp. 44-59.
While I consider myself to be a rather amiable fellow, I love studying medieval Japanese conflicts.
Thematically I have specialized in the study of non-governmental violent actors and their significance for state formations and the development of conflict mediation strategies between centers and peripheries.
Within this broader and interdisciplinary field my research has focused on collective violence and irregular armed forces in general and on banditry in medieval Japan (ca. 1100-1400) in particular. In these studies I have introduced considerable comparative elements, where I have examined similar phenomena in European medieval contexts, as well as in other societies with a relatively low degree of central control.