CJS Noon Lecture Series | Japan's Mountain in Nepal: The First Ascent of Manaslu and...
Schedule
Thu Nov 06 2025 at 12:00 pm to 01:30 pm
UTC-05:00Location
Weiser Hall, University of Michigan | Ann Arbor, MI
Japan's Mountain in Nepal: The First Ascent of Manaslu and Reconciliation with Postwar AsiaPlease note: This lecture will be held in person in room 1010, Weiser Hall, and virtually on Zoom. The webinar is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Once you've registered, joining information will be sent to your email. Register for the Zoom webinar at: https://myumi.ch/mRJD4
Historians have represented Japan’s first ascent of Manaslu (8,163 meters) in the Nepalese Himalayas in 1956 as a vestige of militarism after defeat in World War II and occupation by the United States and its allies. This talk, by contrast, illuminates the significance of the triumph in elaborating peaceful postwar modes of engagement with Asia: knowledge production, imperial diplomacy, and humanitarianism.
Miriam Kingsberg Kadia is a professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History (UC Press, 2014) and Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan (Stanford, 2020), and the coeditor of Drugs and the Politics of Consumption in Japan (Brill, 2023). Her current research is on the history of high-altitude mountaineering during the Cold War.
This lecture is made possible with the generous support of the U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant.
