About this Event
The samurai are often viewed monolithically as fearsome warriors, driven by a fixed code-the Bushido-and bent on dying in service to a lord, or daimyo. However, the Tokugawa Era, the long period of peace (1600 to 1868) after the Shogunate had centralized control in Japan, forced them to adjust. While many samurai continued to uphold martial values, others became bureaucrats, teachers, scholars, artists, and even entrepreneurs.
In Samurai: A Biography in Twelve Lives, Constantine Nomikos Vaporis uses the lives of individual samurai during the Tokugawa Period to illuminate and explore this transformation. We'll hear more about these biographies in his conversation at The Ivy Bookshop with poet and essayist Lia Purpura.
This is history at its most humane, even poetic, inviting us to look closely at 12 individuals that collectively offer a deeper understanding of Japan's early modern era.
Order SAMURAI: A BIOGRAPHY IN TWELVE LIVES here!
Constantine N. Vaporis is a professor of History and the Founding Director of the Asian Studies Program at UMBC. He has received numerous fellowships, including two from Fulbright, NEH, Japan Foundation, and a residential fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. His awards include UMBC’s Presidential Research Professorship, Lipitz Professorship of the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, and selection for two terms on the ASIANetwork Speaker’s Bureau. He is the author of six books, including The Samurai Encyclopedia. A Comprehensive Guide to Japan’s Elite Warrior Class, Tour of Duty, and a ten-part Audible course, “The Real Life of a Japanese Samurai.” He has collaborated with Ted-Ed on “A Day in the Life of a Teenage Samurai,” an animation viewed more than 1.5 million times. His is currently working on a new book, The Black Ships and the Opening of Japan, 1852-54.
Lia Purpura is the author of ten collections of essays, poems, and translations. A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, she is a Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellow, and has been awarded five Pushcart Prizes. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Georgia Review, Agni, Emergence, and elsewhere. She’s taught, as Writer in Residence, at UMBC, and Loyola University, and at conferences, workshops, prisons, and in communities and MFA programs throughout the country. A new collection of poems, Gather, is forthcoming in 2028.
Event venue & nearby stays
Ivy Bookshop, 5928 Falls Road, Baltimore, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.