Reinier H. Hesselink
Professor of History
Seerley 346
Reinier H. Hesselink
Professor of History
Ph.D., University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 1992
Dr. Reinier Hesselink teaches the UNIFI course Problems and Perspectives in Global History: 1,000 Years of Samurai, which is an introductory course on Japanese History. He also teaches upper-level courses Courtiers, Warriors, and Merchants: Japan to 1800 and The Legacy of the Samurai: Japan since 1800.
Professor Hesselink travels regularly to Japan, and has wide-ranging research interests concentrating on Japan's relations with the outside world. His book Prisoners from Nambu: Reality and Make-Believe in 17th-Century Japanese Diplomacy (2002) was also published in Japanese and Dutch language editions. In 2016, he published The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560-1640, for which he had received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is now working on a new book project, provisionally entitled The Suicide of Takenaka Uneme. With this project he aims to explain why the samurai class in the beginning of the seventeenth century enforced a ban on Christianity throughout the Japanese islands.
Professor Hesselink was appointed a Visiting Professor with the Council on East Asian Studies at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University for the 2022/2023 academic year.