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 two 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.); Samurai. An Encyclopedia of Japan’s Cultured Warriors (2022); and the forthcoming The Samurai. A Biography in Twelve Lives, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2025.
Dr. Vaporis also holds an affiliate appointment in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program; served as the Founding Director of the Asian Studies Program (2011-17) and the Interim Director of Asian Studies Program (2024-25); and has twice been a faculty teaching fellow in the Honors College (2011-13, 2023-25). He was awarded the 2013-2016 UMBC Presidential Research Professorship; was selected for the ASIANetwork Speakers Bureau for two terms, 2016-20; received a residential fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, 2020-21; and was awarded the Lipitz Professorship of the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (UMBC) in 2022-23.
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. Outside of UMBC, Professor Vaporis has taught numerous courses on the Asia Pacific for various government agencies. He is also a Smithsonian expert and regularly acts as the educator on Smithsonian Journeys tours of Japan. He also acts as a historical consultant for video game producers and was the principle consultant for a National Geographic exhibition The Samurai.
Dr. Vaporis is currently at work on a new book, The Black Ships: Commodore Perry, American Exceptionalism, and the Opening of Japan, 1852-54, and has created a pilot lecture, “The Rise of the Samurai” for The Great Courses.
His professional website is available at: https://www.constantinenomikosvaporis.com/
Office: 516 Fine Arts Building
Contact: 410-455-2092 | vaporis@umbc.edu