Miriam Rom Silverberg, a UCLA professor emeritus of history celebrated for her writings on modern Japan and known for infusing scholarly research with wit and humor, has died. She was 57.
Silverberg died March 16 at Kindred Hospital in Los Angeles from complications of Parkinson's disease, a relative said.
Silverberg's scholarship is often required reading for those studying modern Japan. She has written about militant Japanese women, Japanese popular culture and Nakano Shigeharu, the poet and cultural critic. She encouraged the study of colonialism through the lens of the intimate, everyday interactions between the colonizer and the colonized.
"She was extremely avant garde theoretically," said Sondra Hale, a longtime friend who is a professor of anthropology and women's studies at UCLA. "She was going in all kinds of new directions in a very pioneering way."
Published last year, Silverberg's book "Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times," examines the nation in the early 20th century, before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The era was marked by a self-consciously modern ethos that, Silverberg argued, challenged state ideology and expansionism. The book, which one author wrote was "destined to be a classic in Japan scholarship," exemplified her mission as a scholar.
"My goal in my work is to ask new questions and to encourage students and my readers to do the same," she said in a profile on a UCLA website. "At a time when disciplinary boundaries and established traditions in area studies are being questioned, we have an opportunity to reflect on why and how we should look at the past, in dialogue with scholars in Japan."
Born Jan. 19, 1951, in Washington, D.C., Silverberg moved with her family to Tokyo at age 9. Her father served as the labor attache at the U.S. embassy in Japan. She remained in Japan through high school and learned to speak Japanese fluently. In 1979, she earned a master's degree in history at Georgetown University and five years later earned a doctorate in Japanese history at the University of Chicago.
Silverberg's influences included the Japanese scholar Fujita Shozo and Americans Tetsuo Najita, Harry Harootunian and John Witek. In 1989, she joined the faculty of UCLA, where she encouraged students to ask tough questions and see the resonance of history in today's events.
