Lee Butler

Lee Butler is currently an independent scholar of late medieval and early modern Japan, with scholarly interests in history, art history, and linguistics.  He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1991 and spent approximately twenty years in academia, teaching principally at the University of Alabama and Brigham Young University.  His early work centered on the place of Japan’s imperial court during the 15th to 17th centuries, and resulted in the monograph Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan, 1467-1680: Resilience and Renewal (Harvard University Asia Center, 2002), among other studies.  At present, Butler’s research centers on the local history of Japan’s Izumi Province during the opening years of the sixteenth century, drawing upon Kujō Masamoto’s diary of 1501-1504–considered the richest source of village life at the time–as his main source.