PRESENTERS
Nathen Clerici is an Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at SUNY New Paltz. His research interests include modern Japanese literature and subcultural studies. He is the author of “History, ‘Subcultural Imagination,’ and the Enduring Appeal of Murakami Haruki” (Journal of Japanese Studies, 2016), “Madness, Mystery and Abnormality in the Writing of Yumeno Kyūsaku” (Japan Forum, 2016), and “Performance and Nonsense: Osaki Midori’s ‘Strange Love’” (Japanese Language and Literature, 2017).
Daisy Yan Du received her Ph.D. degree in Chinese Literature and Visual Culture and Ph.D. minor in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May 2012. In August 2013, she started to work as an Assistant Professor in the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong. She has published articles on animation, film, gender, and popular culture in refereed journals, such as Positions: Asia Critique, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Gender & History, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her first book, entitled Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation 1940s-1970s, was published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2019. She is currently building the Association for Chinese Animation Studies in Hong Kong, with the aim of introducing and promoting Chinese animation to the English-speaking world.
Joan E. Ericson is Professor of Japanese at Colorado College and Chair of the Department of German, Russian, and East Asian Languages. Author of a variety of works, including Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women's Literature (University of Hawaii Press, 1997), editor of Manga Botchan (Yumani, 2011), and co-translator of tanka by survivors of the March 2011 disasters in northeastern Japan in The Sky Unchanged: Tears and Smiles (Kodansha, 2014), she is currently working on a book-length manuscript on the history of Japanese children’s literature. She teaches courses on Japanese Children’s Literature, Gender, Literature and Manga, and Japanese Language and Culture.
Shota Iwasaki is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on modern Japanese literature and visual culture and critical disability studies. His Ph.D. project attends to issues of speaking and hearing in the literary and visual arts in modern Japan, with a focus on the critical and transgressive positions of speech disabilities and disorders in their aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions. He is also interested in critical disability studies and crip theory.
Faye Yuan Kleeman 阮斐娜 received her MA from Ochanomizu University (Tokyo) in 1981 and her PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including funding from the Japanese Ministry of Education (1978-81), Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Grant (1989), the NEH Research Grant (1999), the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (1999, 2005), the Japan Foundation Research Grant (2000, 2006), Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship (2009), and European Consortium of Humanity Studies (2013). Her research focuses on modern Japanese literature and culture, especially postwar fiction and film, women writers, minority (zainichi, buraku) literature, and Japanese colonial literature. Major publications include Under an Imperial Sun (Hawaii, 2003), Dainihon teikoku no kureōru (Keiō UP, 2007), In Transit: Formation of an East Asian Cultural Sphere (Hawaii, 2014) and numerous articles in English, Japanese, and Chinese.
Kimberly Kono is Associate Professor of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Smith College. She is also on the advisory boards of the Program for the Study of Women and Gender and the Program in East Asian Studies. Her book Romance, Family and Nation in Japanese Colonial Literature (Palgrave, 2010) examines the tropes of romance, family and marriage in Japanese literature produced in colonial Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria during the 1930s and 1940s. She has also published articles on Japanese colonial literature in Japanese Language and Literature, the Journal of Japanese Studies and U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal. Her translation and commentary on Koizumi Kikue’s Manchu Girl appears in Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context Critique (Stanford, 2012). Her current project focuses on the representation of Japanese women in colonial Manchuria. She was a recipient of the Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching in 2009.
Atsumi Nakao is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Asian Studies at UBC. Her research interests include female representation in contemporary Japanese visual media and Japanese popular culture. Nakao’s research focuses on Japanese rape culture and the exploitation of juveniles in manga and anime. Her article “The Formation and Commodification of Harajuku's Image in Japan” was published in the Ritsumeikan Journal of Asia Pacific Studies in 2016.
Janet Poole teaches Korean literature and literary translation at the University of Toronto. Her exploration of Korean modernist writers’ response to Japanese fascist occupation during the Pacific War appeared as When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea (Columbia University Press) and won the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. She is translator of the mid-twentieth century writer Yi T’aejun and has published a collection of his anecdotal essays (Eastern Sentiments, Columbia University Press, 2009) and a selection of his short stories written during the Pacific War and the early years of the Democratic People’s Republic (Dust and Other Stories, Columbia University Press, 2018). She was recently awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant for the project “Going North and the History of Korean Modernism.”
Akito Sakasai completed his Ph.D. in modern Japanese literature at the University of Tokyo in 2016. His dissertation is entitled “Yakeato and Yamiichi: National Landscapes and Representations of Occupied Space.” Before arriving at his current post, he worked as an Assistant Researcher at Center for Asia Pacific Studies, Seikei University and as a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University. His research looks extensively at the lingering effects of Japanese empire in post-1945 East Asia. His most recent publication is “Yakeato” no sengo kūkan ron (Theorizing the Postwar Space of the “Yakeato,” Seikyūsha, 2018).
Ji Young Shin received her PhD in Korean literature from Yonsei University and her second PhD in comparative literature in East Asia at Hitotsubashi University in Japan. She is now an assistant professor at the Institute of Korean Studies at Yonsei University. Her first dissertation focused on the formation, changes, and eventualities of discursive spaces during the colonial period in Korea. It was published in Korea under the title The Age of Ab-sense: A Study of Speeches and Round-table Talks in Modern Enlightenment and Colonial Korea in 2012. It will be published in Japanese this year. Her second dissertation is Against Comparison: Dialogical Text and “Contact” in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. She is now interested in the colonial encounters and contact between racial, ethnic, and social groups from the end of the colonial period to the immediate post-war period. She is also the author of Minority Commune (2016) and “Chains of Comparison, Difference in Empathy: Dialogic Texts in Colonial Korea and Taiwan” in the Journal of Korean Studies (2015) and numerous other articles.
Kayoko Takeda is Professor of Translation and Interpreting Studies in the College of Intercultural Communication at Rikkyo University in Tokyo. She received an MA in Translation and Interpretation from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and a PhD in Translation and Intercultural Studies from Universitat Rovira i Virgili. Her main research interests lie in historical, social, and political aspects of translation and interpreting, especially in the context of linguistic mediation in international conflict and war. She is the author of Interpreting the Tokyo Trial (2010) and co-editor of New Insights in the History of Interpreting (2016). She has published chapters and articles on wartime interpreters, including “The visibility of collaborators: Snapshots of wartime and post-war interpreters” (in Fernández-Ocampo & Wolf (eds.), Framing the interpreter: Towards a visual perspective, 2014) and “The interpreter as traitor: Multilingualism in Guizi lai le (Devils on the Doorstep)” (Linguistica Antverpiensia, 2014).
Robert Tierney is professor and head of East Asian Literature and Culture Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His recent publications include Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kōtoku Shūsui and Japan’s First Anti-Imperialist Movement, (University of California Press, 2015) and Tropics of Savagery: the Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (University of California Press, 2010). He is currently working on a translation of Nakae Chōmin’s One Year and a Half and a study of death writings in the Meiji period. He may be contacted at rtierney@illinois.edu.
Nobuko Ishitate-Oku(no)miya Yamasaki is Assistant Professor of Japanese in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures as well as the Program of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Lehigh University. She earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on women, radical alterity, and temporality as represented in literature, film, and art.