Rustin Gates

Biography

Rustin Gates, Associate Professor of History at Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois, holds an MA and PhD from Harvard University in Modern Japanese History. A specialist in the history of Japanese international relations, his research has appeared in a variety of outlets, including scholarly journals, edited volumes, and online postings. His current research project examines Japan’s Self-Defense Forces in the context of US-Japan relations during the Cold War.

In another project, he is examining Japanese American relocation from incarceration camps to the Midwest (specifically Peoria, IL) during WWII. He currently serves as Director of the Asian Studies Program at Bradley.

Teaching

• Honors 101: Japanese Pop Culture
• History 207: Modern Japan, 1860 to the Present
• History 314: Japan and World War II
• History 330: Modern China: Revolutions
• History 331: Samurai in Japanese History
• History 337: Modern Non-Western World History
• History 350: Historical Methods Seminar
• History 452: Area Studies Senior Research Seminar: The Cold War in Asia

Scholarship

• “Japan’s Continental Policy for a Changing World Order: Past and Present.” Review of Yukiko Koshiro, Imperial Eclipse: Japan’s Strategic Thinking about Continental Asia before August 1945, and Sheila A. Smith, Intimate Rivals: Japanese Domestic Politics and a Rising China. Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 2 (May 2018): 535–539.
• “The Dōjinkai and the Promotion of Japanese Modernity in China, 1902–1937,” Studies on Asia, Series V, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 72–95.
• “Out with the New and in with the Old: Uchida Yasuya and the Great War as a Turning Point in Japanese Foreign Affairs.” In The Decade of the Great War: Japan and the Wider World in the 1910s. Edited by Tze-ki Hon, et al. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 64–82.
• “Meiji Diplomacy in the early 1930s: Uchida Yasuya, Manchuria, and Post-withdrawal Foreign Policy.” In Tumultuous Decade: Empire, Society, and Diplomacy in 1930s Japan. Edited by Masato Kimura and Tosh Minohara. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013, 189–214.
• “Solving the ‘Manchurian Problem’: Uchida Yasuya and Japanese Foreign Affairs before the Second World War,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 23, no. 1 (March 2012): 23–43.
• “Pan-Asianism in Prewar Japanese Foreign Affairs: The Curious Case of Uchida Yasuya,” Journal of Japanese Studies 37, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 1–27.

Service

• Asian Studies Program Director, Bradley University, 2020–present
• Curriculum Committee Chair, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Bradley University, 2019-present
• Contributing Editor. Adam Matthew Archives Direct, “Foreign Office Files for Japan, 1919–1952,” 2017
• Associate Editor. Studies on Asia (An Interdisciplinary Journal of Asian Studies), 2015-2018.
• Mediterranean History Search Committee Chair, History Department, Bradley University, 2016-2017
• Senate Committee on Curriculum and Regulations Member, Bradley University, 2015-2018.
• Tenure and Promotion Committee Chair, History Department, Bradley University, 2021-present.
• Book Proposal Reviewer. Palgrave Macmillan Press (2015); Columbia University Press (2021); Oxford University Press (2022).
• Journal Referee. Diplomacy and Statecraft (2011-12); International Relations of the Asia Pacific (2021); Journal of Military History (2022).
• Transfer Student Advisor, History Department, Bradley University, 2008–present