Political Science Faculty and Staff
Deborah J. Milly
Associate Professor
Ph.D., Yale University, 1990
Dr. Milly's teaching and research interests include Japanese politics; social movements; the politics of immigration; comparative public policy; comparative social policy; institutional change; and comparative and regional Asian political economy. Her book, Poverty, Equality, and Growth: The Politics of Economic Need in Postwar Japan (Harvard University Asia Council, 1999, distributed by Harvard University Press; paperback, 2002) received the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize in 2000. Her current research interests include Japanese responses to increased immigration, comparative and global responses to international migration, and comparative patterns of interaction between state and civil society actors. She has presented papers on the subject at international meetings and numerous seminars and is author of "The Rights of Foreign Migrant Workers in Asia: Contrasting Bases for Expanded Protections" in Ole Bruun and Michael Jacobsen, eds., Human Rights and Asian Values: Contesting National Identities and Cultural Representations in Asia (Curzon Press, 2000) and "Policy Advocacy for Foreign Residents in Japan" in Takeyuki Tsuda, ed., Local Citizenship in Recent Countries of Immigration: Japan in Comparative Perspective (2006). She has also published shorter pieces in Japan Focus and for the bulletin of the Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Ph.D., Yale University, 1990
Dr. Milly is currently completing a book-length manuscript on the emergence of a governance regime for immigration and immigrants' policies in Japan from a comparative perspective. This book compares Japan with a set of countries from Asia and Europe that are considered recent countries of immigration. The author identifies two models through which their respective governance regimes have emerged and situates the book's analysis in terms of the literatures on governance and historical institutions.
In the Department of Political Science, Dr. Milly regularly teaches undergraduate courses on Comparative Politics, Asian politics, and Japanese politics. She also teaches various graduate seminars, and served from 2002-2006 as Director of Graduate Studies. She is also active in the East Asia Leadership Group at Virginia Tech and has organized major events for the university community and general public related to East Asia.
Professionally, Dr. Milly is active in the American Political Science Association (APSA) and the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). Currently, she serves as chair of the Japan Political Studies Group, a related group of APSA that also sponsors roundtables at AAS. She held fellowships from the Abe Fellowship Program (1995-1996) and from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2001) to pursue research related immigration and immigrants in Japan. In 2007, she was invited to be a visiting Policy Fellow with the Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. In 2009, she delivered the keynote speech for a symposium on the role of civil society in building an inclusive local society at the Shizuoka University of Arts and Culture in Hamamatsu, Japan.
Email: Deborah J. Milly