Reinier H. Hesselink
Professor of History
Seerley 346
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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.