About

Federico Marcon is a historian of ideas specializing in the intellectual history of early modern and modern Japan. He is broadly interested in the interaction of social, intellectual, institutional, and politico-economic dynamics in knowledge production during these periods, with particular concern for semiotics and historiography. Trained in East Asian Languages and Cultures with a focus on philosophy of language and semiotics from the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari, he conducted research in Japan at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and Waseda University before earning a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the History-East Asia program. Marcon has held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and worked as a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Virginia before joining Princeton University in 2011. His first book, 'The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan,' offers a social and intellectual history of nature studies in Tokugawa Japan, exploring practices, textual production, and changing views on the material environment, while also reconstructing social forces influencing scholars and cultural producers. His second monograph, 'Fascism: The History of a Word,' examines the semantic evolution of the term 'fascism,' mapping its changing meanings and usages across different contexts and actors from 1919 to the present. Currently, Marcon is working on two book projects: one on the semiotic history of monetary structures in early modern Japan, analyzing how money influenced society and ideas; and another on the semiotic analysis of monsters as meaning-making devices within various texts and cultural contexts. His research interests include semiotics, the history and philosophy of history, comparative philosophy, and the history of science. Marcon’s work emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches, combining social, environmental, and intellectual historiography to understand cultural and historical phenomena.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• History
• Law
• Artificial Intelligence
• Machine Learning
• Computer Security
• Linguistics
• Art
• Epistemology
• Geology
• Aesthetics
• Anthropology
• Data science
• Archaeology
• World Wide Web
• Literature

Selected publications

• Review: <i>Archaism and Actuality: Japan and the Global Fascist Imaginary</i>, by Harry Harootunian

  Journal of Japanese Studies · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Tokugawa Philosophy

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-11-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter situates in the social context of Tokugawa Japan the emergence of a class of scholars who engaged in the production of texts and in practices that aimed at developing authoritative inquiries on the nature of reality and the laws that govern it (metaphysics); the motivations, norms, and aims of moral life (ethics); the function and rules of language (philology and linguistics); the principles of good government (politics); and the legitimation of cognitive claims (epistemology), among others. Operating within different institutional frameworks and through texts circulating in a variety of formats (manuscript and printed commentaries, treatises, glossaries, dictionaries, collected lecture notes, etc.), these scholars (generically known as jusha) developed a philosophical archive that should be regarded as a qualitatively and quantitatively unprecedented event in Japanese history outside Buddhist institutions.

  PublisherDOI

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2023

  • Geology

  In the course of writing this book, I have accumulated many debts, personal and professional.These brief words of thanks are inadequate to convey my gratitude to the many people who helped me along the way.In bringing this work to fruition, I owe a great debt to Michael Gordin, who read the penultimate draft-four hundred pages-in six days.He asked dozens of razor-sharp questions and offered insights

  DOI

• Detection of Manipulated Face Videos over Social Networks: A Large-Scale Study

  Journal of Imaging · 2021 · 23 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence

  The detection of manipulated videos represents a highly relevant problem in multimedia forensics, which has been widely investigated in the last years. However, a common trait of published studies is the fact that the forensic analysis is typically applied on data prior to their potential dissemination over the web. This work addresses the challenging scenario where manipulated videos are first shared through social media platforms and then are subject to the forensic analysis. In this context, a large scale performance evaluation has been carried out involving general purpose deep networks and state-of-the-art manipulated data, and studying different effects. Results confirm that a performance drop is observed in every case when unseen shared data are tested by networks trained on non-shared data; however, fine-tuning operations can mitigate this problem. Also, we show that the output of differently trained networks can carry useful forensic information for the identification of the specific technique used for visual manipulation, both for shared and non-shared data.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Quest for Japanese Fascism: A Historiographical Overview

  2021-10-18 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ‘Japanese fascism’ is a historiographical construct rather than a historical reality. Whether Japan’s sociopolitical developments in the 1930s and early 1940s can be legitimately and authoritatively defined as ‘fascist’ depends on the triangulation of three axes of analysis: historical reconstructions of institutional, political, social, and ideological processes; historiographical surveys of the palimpsest of interpretations historians have given to this period of Japanese history; and metahistorical analyses of the cognitive legitimacy of the category of ‘fascism’. This essay focuses on the second axis, offering a historical survey of the historiographical debate on ‘Japanese fascism’ worldwide.

  PublisherDOI

• The history of natural history in Tokugawa Japan

  2021-08-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter introduces the complex series of social and intellectual dynamics that nourished the diversification of the discipline of honzogaku from a field of pharmaceutical research into an authoritative discipline of nature studies that, in the early modern period, matched European naturalis historia in sophistication and coverage. Similarly, although exhibitions of natural species were called yakuhinkai or bussankai (literally gatherings on “medicinal substances” or “products”), their focus was by no means restricted to medicinal substances or agricultural products. The popular craze for natural history that reached its peak in the last century of Tokugawa rule was never sufficient to guarantee economic stability to its practitioners. Finally, despite the fact that European naturalis historia stands, genealogically, as the origin of modern natural sciences, it would be a heuristic fallacy to assume it as standard of judgment in our analysis of the development and truth-claims of Tokugawa honzogaku specialists.

  PublisherDOI

• The ‘book’ as fieldwork: ‘textual institutions’ and nature knowledge in early modern Japan

  BJHS Themes · 2020 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Political Science

  Abstract The analysis of a painting attributed to the rangaku scholar Shiba Kōkan is the occasion to recover the genesis of a stereotypical narrative of Japanese scientific modernization and to survey the role of books in the intellectual life of Tokugawa naturalists. For the practitioners of materia medica ( honzōgaku ), the knowledge of nature began and ended with, and in between continuously referred to, books – Chinese, Japanese and later ‘Dutch’. Canonical texts gave scholars terminology, taxonomy, philosophical justification and legitimation, but not all books had equal value in affecting scholars’ practices. A precise hierarchy, in fact, organized texts, from canonical encyclopedias to private fieldnotes, into ‘textual institutions’ that encouraged further research at the same time that they regulated and framed scholars’ cognitive claims.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Imaginative Mapping: Landscape and Japanese Identity in the Tokugawa and Meiji Eras. By Nobuko Toyosawa. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019. 305 pp. ISBN: 9780674241121 (cloth).

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2020-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Imaginative Mapping: Landscape and Japanese Identity in the Tokugawa and Meiji Eras. By Nobuko Toyosawa. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019. 305 pp. ISBN: 9780674241121 (cloth). - Volume 79 Issue 4

  PublisherDOI

• THE CRITICAL PROMISES OF THE HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE: PERSPECTIVES FROM EAST ASIAN STUDIES

  History and Theory · 2020 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Epistemology

  ABSTRACT This essay, written from the vantage point of a historian specialized in early modern Japan, asks if and in what capacity the history of knowledge offers an advantage for our understanding of the past compared to established historiographical forms. It accounts for the intellectual relevance of this genre of history and concludes with a strong endorsement of its self‐reflexive methodology. It also contends that historical research on East Asia is of inestimable value for this historiographical approach because of its resistance to uncritically universalizing Eurocentric terminology and because of its direct engagement with transcultural translation of both archival sources and heuristic apparatus. Historians working on knowledge production in East Asia or in other parts of the “non‐Western” world must constantly question the effects of their interpretive categories on the topics and archives they study; they are thus accustomed to the epistemological self‐reflection that this new approach seems to require. The essay concludes by advocating metaphorical comparison as a formal model that best expresses historians’ heuristic practices.

  PublisherDOI

• The life of animals in Japanese art

  2019-01-01

  bookOpen access

  A sweeping exploration of animals in Japanese art and culture across sixteen centuries. Few countries have devoted as much artistic energy to the depiction of animal life as Japan. Drawing upon the country's unique spiritual heritage, rich literary traditions, and currents in popular culture, Japanese artists have long expressed admiration for animals in sculpture, painting, lacquerwork, ceramics, metalwork, textiles, and woodblock prints. Real and fantastic creatures are meticulously and beautifully rendered, often with humor and whimsy. This beautiful book celebrates this diverse range of work, from ancient fifth-century clay sculpture to contemporary pieces. The catalog is organized into themes, including the twelve animals of the Japanese zodiac; animals in Shinto and Buddhism; animals and samurai; land animals, winged creatures, and creatures of the river and sea; and animals in works of humor and parody. Exhibition: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA (05.05.-28.07.2019) / Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA (08.09.-08.12.2019)

  OA PDF

Frequent coauthors

• Shel- Don Garon

  Academia Sinica

  25 shared

• Emily J. Thompson

  University of California, San Diego

  25 shared

• Yaacob Dweck

  Brown University

  25 shared

• Laura Edwards

  University of Nottingham

  25 shared

• Rosina Lozano

  Academia Sinica

  25 shared

• Erika Milam

  Goethe University Frankfurt

  25 shared

• Michael Laffan

  Imperial College London

  25 shared

• Marni Sandweiss

  University of California, Berkeley

  25 shared