Participants

J. Keith Vincent

J. Keith Vincent is Chair of the Department of World Languages & Literatures and Associate Professor of Japanese & Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Boston University. His research focuses on modern Japanese literature, queer theory, translation, and the novel. He is the author of Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction (Harvard Asia Center, 2012). Recent articles include “Queer Reading and Japanese Literature,” in the Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature (2016) and “Sex on the Mind: Queer Theory Meets Cognitive Theory,” in the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (2015). Recent edited volumes include Sōseki Great and Small (Tai-shō no Sōseki), a “mini” special issue of the Japanese journal Bungaku (Nov-Dec, 2014), co-edited with Alan Tansman, and Honoring Eve, a Spring 2010 issue of Criticism co-edited with Erin Murphy, on the work of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. His translation of Okamoto Kanoko’s A Riot of Goldfish (Hesperus Press, 2010) won the 2011 U.S. Japan Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, and his translation of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s novella Devils in Daylight is forthcoming from New Directions. He is currently working on two edited volumes on Sōseki, in Japanese and English, and a book on haiku and the Japanese novel, with a focus on Masaoka Shiki and Natsume Sōseki.

Samuel Perry

Samuel Perry is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at Brown University. "With a PhD from the University of Chicago and a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, I have spent many years in Japan and South Korea doing research, most recently in Tokyo, where I surveyed various archives for my next monograph "From Across the Genkai Sea: Japanese Culture and the Korean War." I have also been involved recently in two translation projects: Five Faces of Japanese Feminism: Crimson and Other Works (Univ. Hawaii Press, 2016) is a collection of translated stories by Sata Ineko, funded with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; "The Melancholy of Queer Korea: A Century of Forgotten Fiction" will be the first anthology of homoerotic writings from Korea to be published in English."

Vyjayanthi Selinger

Vyjayanthi Ratnam Selinger is a scholar of Japanese literature and culture. Born and raised in India, she moved to the United States to pursue doctoral work in Japanese literature and culture. Her research examines literary representations of conflict in medieval Japan, using conflict as the key node to examine war memory, legal and ritual constaints on war, Buddhist mythmaking, and women in war. At Bowdoin College, her courses range from medieval to modern topics, including Japanese animation, samurai culture, monster culture, and Japanese WWII memory. She is the author of the book Authorizing the Shogunate: Ritual and Material Culture in the Literary Construction of Warrior Order (Leiden: Brill, 2013.) An active scholar in both Japan and the United States, she publishes and makes presentations in both languages. Her current book project, The Law in Letters: The Legal Imagination of Medieval Japanese Literature, for which she was awarded the Fulbright CORE Scholar Award, examines how medieval writings exploit the dramatic tensions of legal disputes. As a scholar of Indian origin, she has a long-standing interest in cross-cultural flows between India and Japan, and is also working on a project entitled “Transforming the Ramayana: The Chaste Sita in Hobutsushū and Beyond,” which investigates the transcultural travel of the heroine of India’s most famous epic.

Eriko Hata

Eriko Hata is Associate Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shizuoka Eiwa Gakuin University, and a Visiting Researcher at the Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University.

Otilia Milutin

Otilia Milutin teaches Japanese language and literature at Middlebury. She received her Ph.D from the University of British Columbia in 2015 and her M.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Before coming here, she taught at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) and Knox College (Galesburg, Illinois). She specializes in premodern Japanese literature, language and culture, with a focus on issues related to sex, gender and sexuality in Japanese court tales. She is currently finalizing her research on representations of sexual violence in Heian and Kamakura monogatari and conducting new research on contemporary adaptations of Japanese classics in manga, anime and film. Her other research and teaching interests include femmes fatales in Japanese literature and sex and censorship in Japanese cinema.

Beth Carter

Beth Carter is Assistant Professor of Japanese, Modern Languages and Literatures at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Carter’s area of research is mourning rituals and practices in classical Japanese literature with a special emphasis on The Tale of Genji. She also has a secondary interest in representations of women in premodern Japanese texts. Her work introduces the concept of “mourning poetics,” or the way authors layer codified mourning ritual with structures of time and poetic lament to further shape character’s expressions of grief, clarify relationships, and negotiate the divide inherent in death. She has been the recipient of the Fulbright Graduate Research Fellowship (Kyoto, Japan in 2013 and 2015) and the Blakemore Freeman Fellowship for Advanced Asian Language Study (Yokohama, Japan in 2014), among others.

Jyana Browne

Jyana S. Browne is an Assistant Professor of Premodern Japanese Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Maryland. Her areas of research include early modern Japanese popular performance; the interactions of new technologies with traditional theatre; the history of bunraku; and the intersections of performance, sexuality, and embodiment on stage and in everyday life. Her current book project, Embodying Afterlives: Performance and Love Suicide in Early 18th Century Osaka, examines how Chikamatsu created a new kind of embodied spectatorship in his plays about recent events that shaped the practices, performances, and remembrances of love suicide. Dr. Browne earned her doctorate from the University of Washington in 2017. As part of her graduate work, she spent a year studying at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (IUC) with the support of a Blakemore Freeman Fellowship and a year engaging in dissertation research at Waseda University with the support of a Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellowship. She has published her research in Puppetry International and Dai 37 kai kokusai nihon bungaku kenkyūshūkai kaigiroku.

Keiko Eguchi

Keiko Eguchi is a Lecturer for the Department of General Education at the National Institute of Technology, Toyota College. "I study how stories are represented by pictures and texts through illustrated stories made in the Medieval Japan. In some of the 15th-16th-century emaki, the name of the characters and the dialogue are written. This writing is referred to as, “gachūshi” an inter-pictorial dialogue. I am particularly interested in the role of “gachūshi “in the narrative story. I think many stories with “gachūshi “ were created by women and enjoyed by women. So, I am interested in the community including women in the Middle Ages and their literary activities.

Dennis Washburn

Dennis Washburn is the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor in Asian Studies at Dartmouth College. He is author of The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction and Translating Mount Fuji, and has edited several volumes, including Word and Image in Japanese Cinema, Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology and Transformations of Modernity, and The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire. In addition to his scholarly work he has translated several works of fiction, including Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanghai, Mizukami Tsutomu’s The Temple of the Wild Geese, Tsushima Yuko’s Laughing Wolf, and The Tale of Genji.

Allen Hockley

Allen Hockley is associate professor of art history at Dartmouth College and his research engages two fields of study: early Japanese photography and woodblock prints and illustrated books from the Tokugawa through early Showa periods. He teaches a broad array of courses on Japanese and Asian art including: Sacred Art and Architecture of Japan, The Japanese Painting Tradition, Japanese Architecture, Japanese Prints, Contemporary Art of Asia, Sacred Architecture of Asia, and Chinese Art. He offers advanced seminars on Colonial-era Photography in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

James Dorsey
Jim Dorsey is an associate professor of Japanese with an affiliation in the Comparative Literature Program at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and Wartime Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), and a co-editor (with Doug Slaymaker) of Literary Mischief: Sakaguchi Ango, Culture, and the War (Lexington Books, 2010), to which he contributed two critical essays and four translations. He has also published on ideological conversion (tenkō) in the 1930s and wartime representations of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He is currently working on a book about the culture of political protest singers in Japan in the 1960s and a translation of Shōji Kaoru’s 1969 Akutagawa-Award winning novel Be Careful, Little Red Riding Hood (Akazukin-chan, ki o tsukete).

Steven J. Ericson

Steven Ericson specializes in the history of Japan with a focus on the country's modern transformation. His research centers on government financial and industrial policies and their economic and social effects in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan (Harvard, 1996) and Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan: The Impact of the Matsukata Reform (Cornell, 2020) and co-editor of The Treaty of Portsmouth and Its Legacies (University Press of New England, 2008). He is currently working on trust-busting during the U.S. occupation of Japan following World War II..

Miya Qiong Xie

Miya Qiong Xie is a scholar of Comparative Literature whose research involves modern Chinese, Korean and Japanese literatures. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, Borderland Matters: Manchuria and the Making and Unmaking of National Literatures in East Asia (1920-1950) and her second book project on Ethnic Korean literature in China. She is also guest editing a special issue for Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature on Chinese literature across the borderlands with David Wang and Kyle Shernuk. Her articles appear and will appear in Journal of World Literature, Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, Manchukuo Perspectives: Transnational Approaches to Literary Production, and Imagining Communities: Reading Contemporary China Against the Grain. Her first book project has received generous support from a Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Fellowship, an SSRC InterAsia Junior Scholar Fellowship, and a Chiang Ching-kuo Scholar Grant.

Sujin Eom

Sujin Eom's research lies at the intersection of transnational urban history, postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies: 1) the mobility of urban form and its role in the production of exclusion; 2) the (post)colonial regime of citizenship and property rights; and 3) the politics of technology and expertise in statecraft. ​Eom's current research project investigates the transpacific circulation of urban policies and building technologies in the mid-twentieth century, with an emphasis on urban infrastructure.

Emily B. Simpson

Emily B. Simpson is a Lecturer in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College. In 2019, she completed her PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her main research areas include Shinto and Buddhist combinatory systems, modes of divinization, vernacular texts such as engi, and gender and notions of womanhood in medieval Japan. She is the author of "Sacred Mother Bodhisattva, Buddha and Cakravartin: Recasting Empress Jingū as a Buddhist Figure in the Hachiman gudōkun" (Journal of Religion in Japan, 2017) and "An Empress at Sea: Sea Deities and Divine Union in the Legend of Empress Jingū" in The Sea and the Sacred in Japan: Aspects of Maritime Religiosity, edited by Fabio Rambelli (Bloomsbury, 2018). Her book project Crafting a Goddess: Divinization and Womanhood in Late Medieval and Early Modern Narratives of Empress Jingū expands on her doctoral research into Empress Jingū, the Hachiman cult and early modern women's cults centered on childbirth and fertility. .