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.