Ryan Moran wins Full-Year ACLS Grant for 2020-2021
The American Council of Learned Societies has awarded Professor Ryan Moran a full-year grant for the 2020-2021 year.
MARCH 31, 2020 - The ACLS is a non-profit consortium of 75 scholarly organizations/societies
dedicating to advancing the study of the humanities and social sciences. According
to its website, it is "the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the
humanities and related social sciences” https://www.acls.org/About/Our-Work
Professor Moran received an ACLS fellowship (https://www.acls.org/Competitions-and-Deadlines/ACLS-Fellowships), which will allow him to focus on completing his book manuscript. The manuscript is provisionally titled Tabling Death: Life Insurance in Modern Japan, 1881-1945 and is a monograph on the prewar and wartime history of life insurance in Japan.
The project examines the emergence of Japan’s first private life insurance companies in the 1880s and the state-run systems that later emerged in Japan and colonial Korea. Private companies articulated new visions of mutuality in response to the danger of death that awaited all. In doing so, they both reflected and helped to instantiate newer expectations for familial responsibility. Insurance would also become an important means by which the state attempted to manage the labor problem and the problem of peasant unrest in colonial Korea. During World War II, the state would once again use insurance as an important means of martialing the spiritual and economic resources of the populace. In its ability to mold conduct, commodify lives, and rearticulate mutuality, life insurance significantly impacted the constitution of social life in modern Japan and colonial Korea.
Congratulations Professor Moran!