B.A. (Japanese Studies); B.A. Hons (Asian Studies); Ph.D. (History and Musicology), University of Western Australia
Affiliated Faculty: Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, Center for Global Studies
Trained as a historian of religion and emotion, Makoto Harris Takao's approach to music is interdisciplinary, reflected in his historical and contemporary work on Japan’s relationship with Europe, North America, and Australia. As a player of the viol, Takao's work has also informed a number of performance projects both in Australia and Europe, including the Australian and UK premiere revivals of Mulier fortis, a music drama about a Japanese Christian noblewoman composed by Johann Bernhard Staudt in 1698.
As a doctoral fellow with the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions, Takao completed a joint PhD in history and musicology at the University of Western Australia. Prior to his appointment at UIUC, he was based in Berlin where he held a postdoctoral position and later a research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Center for the History of Emotions) and was a core faculty member of the Master’s program in Global History at the Freie Universität.
His current book project, In the Mirror of the Kirishitan: Sounding Japanese Catholicism and Its Musical Worlding in Early Modern Europe, examines the transculturation of religious music, drama, and dance that arose from cultural exchanges kindled by Jesuit missionaries in 16th-century Japan. It also analyzes how these exchanges were represented in European musical drama of the early modern period. His present projects include research in relation to: methodologies for the field of global music history; inter/intra-Asian pop music diplomacy in the early twenty-first century; music and nostalgia.
Research and Supervisory Interests
- Music and early modern Catholicism
- Japanese popular music
- Music and East Asian postcolonial relations
- Music and theater in 16th- to 18th-century Europe
- Music and/in Global History ("Global Music History")
- Music and the history of emotions
Classes Taught
Undergraduate
- Introduction to Music Studies in a Global Context
- History of Western Art Music to 1750
- Global Baroque: Music, Power, and the (Not So) European Tradition
- History of Japanese Popular Music
Graduate
- Methods in Global Music History
- Music and the Early Modern Jesuits
- Early Music and Its Movements
- Research and Bibliography in Music
- Global Baroque: Music Power, and the (Not So) European Tradition
- History of Japanese Popular Music
Select Publications
"Beyond Nostalgia and the Prison of English: Positioning Japan in a Global History of Emotions," Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 18 (2021): 21-43. [Recipient of an honorable mention, Prize for Research in the Humanities awarded by the Humanities Research Institute at UIUC]
"Tokugawa Confucian Sermons as Popular Emotional Education: The Moral and Pedagogical Philosophy of Hosoi Heishū," Journal of Religious History 45 (2021): 50–67 [Winner of the Bruce Mansfield Prize in Religious History]