Floris van Swet

Floris van Swet is a historian of early-modern Japan whose work broadly focusses on the interactions between institutional and everyday understandings of status and identity. He grew up in the Netherlands before moving to the UK where he received his BSc from the University of Surrey, BA from the University of Sheffield, and MA from SOAS, University of London. He received his PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University in May 2019. His dissertation, “Finding a Place: Rōnin in the Tokugawa Period”, explores the fate of rōnin, the so-called masterless samurai. This work shows that rōnin were in fact often neither ‘masterless’ nor ‘samurai’ and in doing so complicates our understanding of social status and governance in Tokugawa Japan. During his time at Yale, van Swet will work as Postdoctoral Associate on the CEAS Digital Tokugawa Lab team and develop his dissertation into a manuscript for publication.