Rate My Professor fabian drixler

Fabian Drixler is Professor of History in Yale University's Department of History, where he teaches Japanese history. He holds the position of Chair of the Council on East Asian Studies and directs the Digital Tokugawa Lab, a collaborative project established in 2019 that employs digital humanities methods such as GIS, text mining, natural language processing, and neural networks to map the feudal territories of Tokugawa Japan at the village level across 270 years. This initiative reassembles territorial structures from archival maps and texts, tracking village changes and making precise geospatial data freely accessible online. Drixler also serves as co-PI of the Climate History Network Japan Team. His research centers on cultural history and historical demography, with particular emphasis on Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. Key topics include infanticide and its ethical underpinnings, stillbirths and the state in modern Japan, Buddhist networks and internal migration, and the history of sustainability, famine, and risk management in early modern Japan. These interests converge in his exploration of contingency and individual agency in shaping demographic patterns, linking population dynamics to evolving conceptions of human life, political space, and time.

Drixler earned his PhD from Harvard University in 2008, with a dissertation titled Infanticide and Fertility in Eastern Japan: Discourse and Demography, 1660-1880. He developed this work into the book Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660-1950, published by the University of California Press in 2013, which charts the rise and fall of a premodern society where couples typically raised only two to three children. The book received the John Whitney Hall Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. Other notable publications include 'Façade Fictions: False Statistics and Spheres of Autonomy in Meiji Japan,' co-authored with Reo Matsuzaki and published in Politics and Society in 2024, and 'Hidden in Plain Sight: Stillbirths and Infanticides in Imperial Japan' from 2016. Drixler teaches courses such as The Making of Japan's Great Peace and Tokugawa Japan and the Human Condition, focusing on the 16th through 19th centuries.