Constantine N. Vaporis, Professor (Ph.D. Princeton University)
Professor Vaporis teaches Japanese and East Asian history. He has received numerous fellowships for research in Japanese history including a Fulbright Scholar’s Award and an NEH Fellowship for College Teachers. He is the author of Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan; Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo and the Culture of Early Modern Japan; Nihonjin to sankin kōtai [The Japanese and Alternate Attendance]; Voices of Early Modern Japan. Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life during the Age of the Shoguns (Second, revised ed.); and Samurai. An Encyclopedia of Japan’s Cultured Warriors (2022). Dr. Vaporis also holds an affiliate appointment in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program and is the Founding Director of the Asian Studies Program. He was awarded the 2013-2016 UMBC Presidential Research Professorship; was selected for the ASIANetwork Speakers Bureau for 2016-20; received a residential fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton for 2020-21 to continue work on a collection of biographies of samurai, Samurai. Stories of Warriors in an Age of Peace. He has collaborated with TedEd on the production of an educational animation entitled “A Day in the Life of a Teenage Samurai” that has been viewed more than a million times: A Day in the Life of a Teenage Samurai. For 2022-23 Prof. Vaporis has been awarded the Lipitz Professorship of the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences to work on a new book, The Black Ships: Commodore Perry, American Exceptionalism, and the Opening of Japan, 1852-54. For 2023-34 he will serve as an Honors College Teaching Fellow.
His professional website is available at: https://www.constantinenomikosvaporis.com/
Office: 516 Fine Arts Building
Contact: 410-455-2092 | vaporis@umbc.edu