Interview: New books on queenship in East Asia

The Royal Studies Podcast

In this episode, host Ellie Woodacre interviews Alban Schmid and Alison J. Miller to discuss queenship in East Asia. We discuss K-Dramas and real life palace intrigues in Choson Korea and the role of Japan's empresses in the visual propaganda of the Meiji Restoration period. Both authors reflect on to what extent we can apply the idea of queenship to monarchies in East Asia and royal women who they think deserve more attention or reconsideration.
Guest Bios:
Alison J Miller, Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Asian Studies at the University of the South (Sewanee), is a specialist in modern and contemporary Japanese art history, focusing on two-dimensional media, gender, and the imperial family. She has published in the Journal of Japanese Studies, TransAsia Photography Review, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA), and various public humanities projects and museum catalogues. She is co-editor and contributing author for The Visual Culture of Meiji Japan: Negotiating the Transition to Modernity (Routledge, 2021) and Transposed Memory: Visual Sites of National Recollection in 20th and 21st Century East Asia (Brill, 2024). Her book, Envisioning the Empress: The Lives and Images of Japanese Imperial Women, 1868-1952 (Routledge, 2025) analyzes the social impact of the images of the modern Japanese empresses. She received her PhD from the University of Kansas and has taught at Bowdoin College and the Kansas City Art Institute, and her work has been funded by a Fulbright Fellowship, Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellowship, Appalachian College Association Faculty Fellowship, and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, among others.

Personal website: https://www.alisonjmiller.com/

Alban Schmid studied politics and international relations at Sciences Po Paris and Peking University before focussing his attention on political history of East Asia during his graduate studies at the University of Oxford. He currently works at his alma mater in France. His new book The Institutional Power of Chosŏn Korea's Queen Dowagers, was recently published in ARC Humanities Press’ Gender and Power in the Premodern World series.