Overview
Drisana Misra is a scholar of the Japanese archipelago and its transregional connections with the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her research takes an interdisciplinary approach to excavate traditionally obscured routes of transregional exchange, revealing the manifold ways in which Japanese and New World chroniclers, mapmakers, and artists participated in knowledge creation. She also studies Japanese literary and visual engagement with foreign realms, objects, and knowledges during the Edo Period (1603-1868).
She is working on her first monograph, tentatively entitled Japanese New Worlds: Intersecting Imaginaries of the Nanban Period (c. 1543–1641). Her arguments trace the emergence of an Amer-Asian spatiality in the northern Pacific by developing comparative, decolonizing methodologies in conversation with scholars of early colonial Latin America. Through envisioning the early modern world through Amer-Asian imaginaries, her book project explores how the "worlding" of the world can be reformulated through a vast network of non-European and indigenous knowledge transfers.
Prior to joining the faculty at Cornell, Drisana was a visiting research affiliate at the University of Sydney, as well as at the Historiographical Institute at Tokyo University, where she was supported by a Fulbright-IIE Fellowship from 2019-2020.
In Spring 2025, Drisana is looking forward to teaching a First-Year Writing Seminar on the "connected cities" of the Indo-Pacific realm and the early modern Japanese diaspora, as well as a seminar on Japan and the "New World" during the so-called "Age of Discovery."
Research Focus
- Early Modern Japanese Literature
- Early Modern Japanese Material Culture
- Critical Geography
- Intellectual History
- Decolonial Theory
- Human-Animal Studies
- Early Colonial Latin American Art and Literature
Publications
2024 "Animals, Emotions, and 'Order Trouble' During the Jesuit Mission to Japan," The Journal of Religious History
2024 "Nonsense, Gibberish, and Scribble: Playing with Foreign Languages and Re-Orienting Epistemic Regimes." Interdisciplinary Edo: Toward an Integrated Approach to Early Modern Japan, eds. Joshua Schlachet and William Hedberg (London: Routledge). 50-66.
2024 "The Virtuality of Japanese Playing Cards: Immersion and Transgression in Early Modern Material Culture." The Handbook of Japanese Games, ed. Rachael Hutchinson (Tokyo: MHM Limited)
