Research Interests: Mongolian history, 13th century to the present; Sino-Mongolian and Russo-Mongolian relations.

Current Research Project: A History of Land Use in Mongolia, 13th Century to the Present.

Books and selected articles:

Pages from the Past: The 1910 Moscow Trade Expedition to Mongolia (EastBridge, 2007).

The Modernization of Inner Asia (coauthor) (M.E. Sharpe, 1991).

Mongolian Rule in China: Local Administration in the Yuan Dynasty (Harvard University Press, 1989).

"The Persistence of Pastoral Nomadism," in Ts. Ishdorzh, ed., Essays on Mongol Studies (2005).

"The Mongols and China: Cultural Contacts and the Changing Nature of Pastoral Nomadism (Twelfth to Early Twentieth Centuries)", in Amitai and Biran, eds., Mongols, Turks, and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World (2005).

"The Yuan Government and Society," in Franke and Twitchett, ed.s, Cambridge History of China, Vol. VI (1994)

"Merchant Associations in Yuan China: the Ortogh," Asia Major (1989).

Books and selected articles:

The Politics of Education: Teachers and School Reform in Weimar Germany (Berghan Books, 2002)

State, Society, and the Elementary School in Imerial Germany (Oxford University Press, 1989)

Jewish Activism in Imperial Germany. The Struggle for Civil Equality (Yale University Press, 1978)

"Returning Refugee Political Scientists and America's Democratization Program in Germany after the Second World War," German Studies Review 31, no.2 (2008)

"German Antifascist Refugees in America and the Public Debate on 'What Should be Done with Germany after Hitler,' 1941-1945," Central European History, 40, (2007)

"The Reception of Refugee Scholars from Nazi Germany in America: Philanthropy and Social Change in Higher Education," Jewish Social Studies 12, no. 3 (2006)

"German Schoolteachers, National Socialism, and the Politics of Culture at the End of the Weimar Republic," Central European History 34, no. 1 (2001)

"Radical Schoolteachers and the Origins of the Progressive Education Movement in Imperial Germany, 1900-1914," History of Education Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2000)

"From Coexistence to Conflict - Zionism and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1897-1914," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 27 (1982)

"Liberals, Socialists, and the Defense Against Anti-Semitism in the Wilhelminian Period," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 25 (1980)

Neil Waters, Kawashima Professor of Japanese Studies and Professor of History.   Waters grew up as a western U.S. rolling stone, in Portland, San Diego, Fresno, Modesto, Denver, Sacramento, and back to Portland.  He and his wife Linda both served in the Peace Corps in South Korea in 1967-69, and that experience crystallized his interest in Northeast Asia.  Twice chair of the Department of History at Middlebury College, Waters has also served as Director of International Studies and Director of East Asian Studies.  Before coming to Middlebury College in 1990, Waters was an associate professor of history at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.   He received his Ph,D in Japanese History from University of Hawaii in 1978.

His publications include Japan's Local Pragmatists (Harvard University Press, 1983) and articles in Journal of Japanese Studies, Journal of Asian Studies and other journals.  He is a co-editor of the Middlebury International Studies Series, and edited and contributed to the first volume in the series: Beyond the Area Studies Wars (Dartmouth: University Press of New England, 2000). He is currently working on the tension between local and national loyalties in the evolution of Japanese young men's associations before World War II.