Dr. Natalia Doan’s research and teaching focus on the transnational history of early modern and modern Japan, particularly in connection to popular culture and conceptions of gender, power, and culture. Her work explores Japanese transnational engagement across different times and spaces in the pursuit of solidarity and positive change.

She co-edited the volume Black Transnationalism and Japan (Leiden University Press, 2024), which discloses more than a century of cultural activity and intellectual movements created, shaped, and led by Japanese and Black people. Since before the American Civil War, African American and Japanese encounters produced relationships and discourses of knowledge that transcended Eurocentric conceptions of civilization and hierarchies of personhood. Such transnational encounters reveal not only heretofore hidden historical actors, friendships, and solidarities, but also innovative cultural productions that challenged hierarchies of race, culture, and imperialism. Her next project examines the Boshin War (1868–69) and the interconnectivity of the northern, pro-shogunate domains with transnational actors.

She has written for, among other publications, the Historical Journal, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, and the Journal of Social History, in which her article was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society Alexander Prize. Dr. Doan has appeared in several Japanese documentaries, most recently discussing her research on samurai. Her forthcoming book from Leiden University Press examines the celebrity and transnational influence of samurai overseas in the mid-nineteenth century.

This academic year (2025–2026), she will teach HIAS 393 History of Modern Japan, HIAS 490 “Samurai: Fact/Fiction/Fantasy,” HIST 262 “History of World Civilizations, 1500–Present,” and the graduate course HIST 562 “Transnational History of Modern Japan.”

Selected Publications

• Doan, Natalia. Civil War Samurai: The 1860 Japanese Embassy and Tateishi Onojirō in Antebellum America. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2026.
• Doan, Natalia and Sho Konishi, eds. Black Transnationalism and Japan. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2024.
• Doan, Natalia. “The Iwakura Mission: Knowledge, Networks, and National Identity.” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 31, no.3 (2024): 225–235.
• Doan, Natalia. “The 1860 Japanese Embassy and the Opening of American Civilisation: Samurai, Interracial Romance, and Southern Print Culture.”In Reopening the Opening of Japan: New Approaches to Japan and the Wider World in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century, edited by Lewis Bremner, Manimporok Dotulong, and Sho Konishi, 21–58. Leiden: Brill, 2023.
• Doan, Natalia. “African America and Japan.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, ed. David Ludden, 2022.
• Doan, Natalia. “Samurai and Southern Belles: Interracial Romance, Southern Morality, and the 1860 Japanese Embassy.” Journal of Social History 55, no. 1 (2021): 149–179.
• Doan, Natalia. “The 1860 Japanese Embassy and the Antebellum African American Press.” The Historical Journal 62, no. 4 (2019): 997–1020.