Dr J. Charles Schencking
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Asia Institute and Department of History Room 309 Tel: + 61 3 8344 5976 |
Please note, Charles Schencking is on leave from the University of Melbourne until July 2012. He is currently at the University of Hong Kong and can be contacted at: schencking@hku.hk.
Biography
Charles Schencking is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Historical Studies and the Asia Institute where he has taught Japanese history with flair and passion since 2000. Charles brings a truly international background to his subjects, having studied and taught at universities in Britain, Japan, and America.
Charles has published widely on the political, social, and environmental history of Japan. His current research revolves around the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake that destroyed Tokyo and the culture of catastrophe and reconstruction in Japan from 1923 to 1930. In 2007, Charles was awarded a Universitas 21 Fellowship for 2008 to collaborate with scholars of natural disasters and interdisciplinary teaching at the National University of Singapore, Hong Kong University, University of British Columbia, and Western Washington University.
Charles' teaching stresses the importance of learning as an active and holistic process of discovery. Through interactive lectures, innovative tutorial exercises, and targeted, integrated assessment he fosters the development of the core skills of inquiry, research, and persuasive expression. Reflecting his commitment to research-led teaching, Charles’ subjects demonstrate how the historical study of natural disasters, catastrophes, and wars in Asia and the Pacific have critical relevance to understanding the world today. In all of his teaching endeavors, he emboldens students to think critically and creatively about the past in the hope that this will challenge the way they see the present and, as global citizens, perhaps even shape the future.
Charles participates in numerous programs geared to assisting international students and those from equity groups succeed in tertiary education at the University of Melbourne. He also participates in university-wide training workshops for new tutors and staff that focus on the challenges and rewards of teaching in a multi-cultural, international classroom. In 2007, Charles served on the selection committee for the inaugural round of the Kwong Lee Dow Young Scholars Program.
In April 2006, Charles Schencking was awarded the Barbara Falk Teaching Award. He was selected as the teacher of the year within the Arts, Education, Law, and Music faculties at the University of Melbourne.
In November 2006, Charles Schencking was awarded one of twenty-six Carrick Awards for Australian University Teaching. This is the highest award one can win for teaching in Australian Higher Education. He was selected in the Early Career Category.
Research Interests
His principal interest is modern Japanese history, particularly the inter-relationship between state and society in the Meiji and Taishô periods (1868-1926). He has published widely on the politics of the Imperial Japanese Navy, (two journal articles, four chapters in edited volumes, and a book published by Stanford University Press (2005) entitled: Making Waves: Politics, Propaganda, and the Emergence of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1868-1922. ISBN# 0-8047-4977-9. Charles has also been named the Asia-Pacific Coordinator for the up coming multi-national Russo-Japanese War Conference to be held in Tokyo between 23 and 27 May 2005.
Current Research Project
Title: The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Culture of Catastrophe and Reconstruction in 1920s Japan.
My project aims to transform our understanding of one of the most destructive, deadly, and costly natural disasters of the 20th century: The Great Kanto Earthquake and Conflagration of 1923. This catastrophe resulted in the destruction of 45% of Tokyo's built environment and over 90% of Yokohama's urban landscape. In less than a week, this disaster destroyed an estimated 6.5 billion yen in assets (a figure four times larger than Japan's 1923 national budget), rendered over 2 million people homeless, and killed nearly 120,000 people. In the words of moral philosopher Shimamoto Ainosuke, the 1923 calamity "overturned Japan's culture from its very foundation."
A primary aim of my research is to examine the 1923 disaster not only as an event of unprecedented death, destruction and dislocation, but also to use the catastrophe and the relief and reconstruction efforts that followed as a multifaceted interdisciplinary lens on interwar Japan. Specifically, this project will explore how numerous commentators and bureaucratic elites interpreted and constructed the 1923 disaster as an act of divine warning and punishment to admonish Japan's subjects for leading what many elites believed were immoral, self-centred, and extravagant lifestyles. My project will also investigate how and why many bureaucrats and organizations attempted to use the reconstruction process: first, to reshape the built environment of Tokyo to enable better state-directed social management initiatives; and second, to further a complex project of national spiritual reconstruction of Japan's subjects on an ideological, physical, and political level.