Assoc. Prof. Dr.
Haruka Oba
Haruka Oba is a guest researcher at the research units Digital Historiography and Edition (project Digital scholarly edition of sources on Habsburg-Ottoman Diplomacy) and History of Art (project Psychagogische Medien der Jesuiten) and a co-worker of the international research project Archiving Project of the Estate of Margret Dietrich (1920-2004) at the Institute of Culture Studies and Theater History of the Austrian Academy of Science. She is also Associate Professor of the Faculty of Literature at the Kurume University in Japan.
Brief Biography
Haruka Oba studied European History at the Kyushu University in Fukuoka (Japan) and Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in Germany. In 2010 she got her PhD in History (Early Modern History) from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. She collected her teaching experience at the University of Saarland and University of Erfurt in 2011 and at the Kyoto Prefectual University in 2014, while she continued to do research with different scholarships from Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, Weimar Stiftung, DHI Rom, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies (Innsbruck) and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). She belonged to the Austrian-Japanese Joint Projekt “Japan on the Jesuit Stage“ (04.2017-03.2019), supported by FWF and JSPS. Since April 2017 she is the Associate Professor of Kurume Universität in Japan.
Research Interests
Period: 16th to 18th centuries
Area: German-speaking Areas, Habsburg Monarchy
Topics: Depiction of “otherness” (Japanese/ Turks), Dramas and Arts of Jesuit order, Depiction of martyrs, representation of rulers, Catholic Reform, Confessional Conflicts.
Selected Publications
- Oba, Haruka/ Schaffenrath, Florian/ Watanabe, Akihiko (Hg.), Japan on the Jesuit Stage. Transmissions, Receptions, and Regional Contexts, Leiden: Brill 2021.
- The Development of Jesuit Drama on Japan in Bavaria. The Historical Context of the Play Victor, Staged in Munich in 1665, in: Haruka Oba/ Florian Schaffenrath/ Akihiko Watanabe (Hg.), Japan on the Jesuit Stage, Leiden: Brill 2021, pp. 304-319.
- Die Bekehrung japanischer Fürsten zum Katholizismus und ihre Darstellung im Jesuitentheater des deutschen Sprachgebiets, in: Wolfgang Behringer (Hg.), Konversionen zum Katholizismus in der Frühen Neuzeit. Institutionen, Interaktionen und Internationalisierung, Lit Verlag, 2019, S. 309-329.
- Using the Past for the Church’s “Present” and “Future”. The Remembrance of Catholic Japan in Drama and Art in the Southern German-speaking Area, in: Wolfgang Schmale, Marion Romberg, Josef Köstlbauer (Hg.), The Language of Continent Allegories in Baroque Central Europe, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag 2016, pp. 71-85.
- Francis Xavier and Amor Dei in Jesuit Drama in the South of the German-Speaking Area, in: European Medieval Drama 18, 2016, pp. 129-157.
- Das Jesuitentheater und die Kunstwerke der Jesuitenkirche. Die frühneuzeitlichen Japanbilder im deutschen Sprachgebiet, in: Elke Huwiler (Hg.), Das Theater des Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit. Kulturelle Verhandlungen in einer Zeit des Wandels (Amsterdam German Studies), Heidelberg: Synchron 2015, S. 81-102.