B.A. (Japanese Studies); B.A. Hons (Asian Studies); Ph.D. (Musicology and History), University of Western Australia
Affiliated Faculty, Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies
Makoto Harris Takao is a musicologist, historian, and player of the viol who works variously on Japan’s relationship with Christianity from the sixteenth century to the present day.
As a doctoral fellow with the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions, Takao completed a joint PhD in musicology and history at the University of Western Australia. Prior to his appointment at UIUC, he was based in Berlin where he held a research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and was a core faculty member of the Master’s program in Global History at the Freie Universität.
His interdisciplinary research intersects with Japanese studies, religious studies, global history, the history of emotions, and the study of European music and theater of the early modern period. He has published articles with Early Music, the Journal of Jesuit Studies, the Journal of Religious History (forthcoming), and Contributions to the History of Concepts (forthcoming), as well as book chapters relating to Catholicism and the performing arts.
Takao’s current book project is entitled Of Mission and Music: Japanese Christianity and Its Reflection in Early Modern Europe. In addition to this, he is working on the phenomenon of “vicarious nostalgia” as it relates to the transnational revival of the Japanese genre of popular music from the 1970s and 1980s known as “City Pop” (Missing Someone Else’s Past: Vicarious Nostalgia and the Revival of Japanese City Pop). Takao is also investigating the role of colonial networks in the mobility of the early music revival during the 1930s.
At UIUC, Takao teaches courses on music history until 1750; methods in global music history; music and early modern colonialism; and history of Japanese popular music.