Herman Ooms
Herman Ooms
Professor Emeritus
Biography
We are sad to announce that Herman Ooms, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History, passed away last week on December 14. He was an active member of our department from 1987 until he retired in 2012. Herman was educated in Belgium, where he majored in Classics and earned an MA in Philosophy; in Japan, where he earned an MA at Tokyo University in the Anthropology of Religion; and at the University of Chicago, where he received a PhD in Japanese History. His research and teaching focused on pre-modern and early modern (Tokugawa) Japanese History and Cultural Theory. In his research and teaching, he combined anthropological approaches, intellectual history and critical theory. His publications include Tokugawa Ideology: Early Constructs, 1570-1680 (Princeton University Press, 1985), Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law (California University Press, 1996), Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan: The Tenmu Dynasty, 650-800 (University of Hawai’i Press, 2009).
A more comprehensive obituary will be forthcoming.
Publications
- Charismatic Bureaucrat: A Political Biography of Matsudaira Sadanobu (1758-1829) (University of Chicago Press, 1975);
- Tokugawa Ideology: Early Constructs, 1570-1680, (Princeton University Press, 1985) the Japanese translation of which, Tokugawa ideorogii (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1990) received the Watsuji Tetsuro Culture Prize in 1992; a Korean translation is being prepared;
- Sosensuhai no shimborizumu (Symbolism in Ancestor Worship; Tokyo: Dobundo, 1987);
- Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law, (University of California Press, 1996); special recognition by the Herbert Jacobs Book Prize Committee of the Law and Society Association in 1997; Japanese translation, 2008;
- Shukyo kenkyu to ideorogii bunseki (Essays on Ideology and Religion in Japan; Perikansha, 1996);
- Shinpojiumu Tokugawa Ideorogii (Symposium on Tokugawa Ideology: Appraisals and Critiques), co-edited with Okuwa Hitoshi (Perikansha, 1996);
- “Forms and Norms in Edo Arts and Society,” in Edo Art in Japan 1615-1868, (National Gallery of Art, Washington). Exhibition Catalogue, 1998;
- Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan: The Tenmu Dynasty, 650-800. (University of Hawai’i Press, 2009)
