Dissertation Title
The Science of Language & The Language of Science: Worlding Knowledge and the Forging of Linguistics in Japan
Chair: Mark McNally
(Proposal Defended: February 2026)
Dissertation Abstract: The transregional formation of linguistic science across Germany and Japan involved both an inheritance from early modern linguistic scholarship and a calculated rhetorical eclipse thereof as modern linguistics consolidated as an autonomous academic discipline. Spanning early nineteenth-century Dutch Studies (Rangaku) and the evolving discursive life of language analysis, my work maps the socio-epistemic passage from early modern practices of translation and Romantic philology to the emergence of Sprachwissenschaft and Gengogaku. Along this trajectory, I attend to how phonocentric science reorganized fluid vernaculars into instruments of territorialized statehood in the respective yet entangled contexts. Centered on modern Japan, the project brings linguistic anthropology and semiotics into conversation with the history of science and global intellectual history. Reconceptualizing “transfer” as a multipolar dynamic of co-production, this study connects the intellectual and institutional fulcrums of globalization to regimes of territorialization. By so doing, it exposes the transnational contingency underlying the universalist and positivist veneer of modernity as a triumphal narrative of rationalism.