Elyssa Faison

Elyssa Faison

Elyssa Faison received her bachelor's degree history and East Asian studies from Oberlin College in 1988. After graduation, she spent eighteen months as a Japanese Ministry of Education Research Scholar in the Sociology Department of Nagoya University. Upon returning to the United States in 1990, she moved to Boston and took a staff position in the East Asian Legal Studies Program of the Harvard Law School. In 1992 she began graduate studies in Japanese history at UCLA, where she received an M.A. in 1994 and a Ph.D. in 2001. Her main area of interest is in the female textile workers who were the driving force behind the turn of the century capital accumulation that set the stage for Japan's later development into an economic superpower.

She worked as a teaching assistant at UCLA for courses in Chinese history, Japanese history, world history and women’s studies, then began a one-year position as a visiting lecturer at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus teaching Japanese history at the undergraduate and graduate levels. She joined the faculty of the University of Oklahoma as an assistant professor in 2000. She was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Yale Council on East Asian Studies for 2003-2004, during which time she taught an undergraduate seminar called “Remembering Wartime in Japan” geared toward East Asian Studies majors at Yale. This course will be taught for the first time at OU during spring semester 2005 as a History/International and Area Studies capstone class, and has been selected by OU President David Boren as the first ever OU Presidential “Dream” Course. This designation means that a number of specialists in the field of historical memory from across the U.S. and around the world will be invited to speak at OU, and to participate for one class session each as special guest instructors.

For more information, visit her Web site.