Petrice Flowers
(Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 2002)
Curriculum Vitae (Updated 04.10.08)
I’m from Detroit, Michigan (yes, the actual city) where much of my family still lives. Many of my relatives are from “down south” and moved north for work during and after the great migration. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend Wellesley College in Massachusetts where I started studying both Political Science and Japanese. I took my first trip to Japan in the summer of 1993 when I spent two months in Hakodate, a port city on the island of Hokkaido. I ate a lot of squid, Hakodate ’s meibutsu (local specialty), learned the ika odori (squid dance) and took full advantage of an experience that I wasn’t sure I’d ever have again. With that trip, my love of travel was born. Although I’ve been to several countries (Canada, Mexico, Jamaica, Peru, Brazil, Korea, Thailand, the Netherlands, and Hungary) I keep returning to Japan, where I have lived for a total of more than three years.
I earned my Ph.D. in 2002 from the University of Minnesota where I specialized in International Relations (IR) and Comparative Politics with an emphasis on Japan. While at U of MN I also did extensive coursework towards the Ph.D. minor at the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies. I have received several grants, fellowships and awards including a MacArthur Fellowship that provided support for one year of my dissertation research; several Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) grants from the United States Department of Education that provided financial support for intensive language study at the University of Michigan ’s Summer Language Institute and the University of Minnesota. The Boren Fellowship provided support for intensive language study at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama Japan in 1998-99.
Prior to joining the faculty in the Department of Political Science, I was a Social Science Research Council/Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (SSRC/JSPS) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo (2002-2004). My major research and teaching interests include IR theory, international norms, state identity, women and refugees in Japan, Japanese non-governmental organizations and Japan’s civil society. I am currently working on a project that focuses on the question of how international law affects domestic policy in Japan. In this research, I examine the role of domestic advocates, state identity and domestic norms in Japan’s adoption of and compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the International Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the Optional Protocols, and the Agreement to Prohibit the Production, Use, Transfer and Stockpiling of Anti-personnel Landmines. I am also participating in a collaborative research project entitled “Remaking Transnationalism: Japan, Foreign Aid, and the Search for Global Solutions” sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.
In my first year at UH, I’ve taught courses on both International Relations and Japan: Japan in International Relations (undergraduate), Japan’s Domestic Politics (undergraduate), International Relations Theory (graduate).
Relevant Links:
Center for Japanese Studies
http://www.hawaii.edu/cjs/
Indigenous Politics Call for Papers
http://www.politicalscience.hawaii.edu/forms/indigenouscall.pdf