{"id":644452,"date":"2025-03-26T10:23:42","date_gmt":"2025-03-26T14:23:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=644452"},"modified":"2025-03-26T10:23:42","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T14:23:42","slug":"william-hauser-professor-emeritus-of-history-remembered-644452","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/william-hauser-professor-emeritus-of-history-remembered-644452\/","title":{"rendered":"William Hauser, professor emeritus of history, remembered"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hauser was devoted to teaching Japanese and East Asian history over a career of nearly four decades.<\/h2>\n
\"Black
William (Bill) Hauser in the late 1970s. (University of Rochester photo \/ Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

William (Bill) Hauser, a professor emeritus of history, is being remembered for his distinguished teaching career and his research on the economic and social history of Japan\u2019s Tokugawa period<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Hauser, who died at the age of 85, taught at the University of Rochester<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0for nearly 40 years\u2014from 1974 until his retirement in 2011, serving as department<\/a> chair from 1979 to 1985. His intellectual curiosity knew few boundaries: As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago he majored in mathematics, which he followed with a master\u2019s degree in East Asian studies and a PhD in Japanese history, both from Yale University.<\/p>\n

Hauser was devoted to interdisciplinary teaching and sustaining the field of Japanese and East Asian history at the University, and had a deep interest in Japanese film. He was also among the first faculty members in his department to draw on film as a tool for the teaching of history, according to longtime colleague Stewart Weaver<\/a>, the University\u2019s Franklin W. And Gladys I. Clark Professor of History.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd,\u201d Weaver recalls, \u201cBill had a wry, ironic disposition, like he\u2019d seen it all before and wasn\u2019t going to let any of it bother him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Case in point: in 1991, when the Students\u2019 Association bestowed their Teacher of the Year award on Hauser. \u201cI\u2019m not sure the administration cares. I\u2019m not sure my department cares, but it\u2019s nice to know the students care,\u201d Hauser said in his acceptance speech, vowing to use his $500 prize on a piece of art or toward one of his many trips to Japan.<\/p>\n

But his department did care.<\/p>\n

Speaking as chair at the time of Hauser\u2019s retirement, Weaver called him a \u201cJapanese historian by instinct as well as training\u201d who was \u201ca central and indispensable pillar of Asian and East Asian studies at the University for almost four decades.\u201d<\/p>\n

His undergraduate courses on the samurai, on traditional and modern Japan, on Japan and the Second World War, on women in East Asia, and on East Asian film\u2014the latter his perennial favorite\u2014consistently ranked among the department\u2019s most popular, Weaver noted in his speech on the occasion of Hauser\u2019s retirement.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo of Bill\u2019s passions were palpable, and I was lucky to experience both,\u201d remembers long-time colleague and friend Theodore Brown<\/strong><\/a>, a Rochester professor emeritus of history and of public health sciences. \u201cI went to his classroom on several occasions and enjoyed watching his joy teaching undergraduates the intricacies of Japanese history. The other was cooking\u2014and eating\u2014and I was lucky to be his guest for dinner many times where he would \u2018wok up\u2019 a storm.\u201d<\/p>\n

The author of Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: \u014csaka and the Kinai Cotton Trade<\/em><\/a> (Cambridge University Press, 1974), Hauser wrote about the Japanese textile trade, about Osaka and its early commercial development, on Tokugawa political authority in Western Japan, and on the samurai and the Tokugawa shogunate. In the 1980s, Hauser\u2019s interests turned toward Japanese family history and the management practices of Japanese family businesses. Later, his research interests shifted toward the portrayal of women and war in Japanese film and the Asian American experience generally.<\/p>\n

Hauser is survived by his three sons, Benjamin, Aaron, and Zachary\u2014all of whom are adopted from South Korea and about whom he said, according to his obituary<\/a> in the Minnesota Star Tribune<\/em>, that raising them \u201cwas more important and meaningful than anything he could publish.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hauser was devoted to teaching Japanese and East Asian history over a career of nearly four decades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":942,"featured_media":644492,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[21422,37112,3396,16072],"class_list":["post-644452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-department-of-history","tag-faculty","tag-obituaries","tag-school-of-arts-and-sciences"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWilliam Hauser, professor emeritus of history, remembered<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"William Hauser was devoted to teaching Japanese and East Asian history over a career of nearly four decades at the University of Rochester.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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