Antoni Ucerler

M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J., is the Director of the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at Boston College, which relocated from the University of San Francisco to Boston College’s Brighton campus in February 2022. He is also an Associate Professor in Boston College’s History Department and Associate Fellow of Campion Hall at the University of Oxford. He formerly taught for many years at Sophia University in Tokyo and was also a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. His research has focused on the European expansion into East Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a particular focus on Christianity in Japan. He also works on the “connected histories” of Christianity in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, from the perspective of global history in the early modern period. A member of the Society of Jesus since 1981, he first went to Japan to work as a missionary in 1985. After studying theology at the Gregorian University in Rome and ordination as a priest in Naples in 1994, he completed his D.Phil. at the University of Oxford in 1999. He speaks or reads in twelve languages and is the author of multiple published works, most recently The Samurai and the Cross: The Jesuit Enterprise in Early Modern Japan (Oxford University Press, 2022).