PARTICIPANTS
DISCUSSANTS
PANELISTS
Jonathan Glade is an assistant professor of Japanese and Global Studies at Michigan State University. His research focuses on Korean and Japanese literature produced during the postwar US Military Occupation. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Occupied Liberation: Fragmentation and Loss in Southern Korea and Japan, 1945–1952.
Jimin Ha earned her master’s degree in East Asian Studies at Washington University, but began studying Japanese literature only recently; previously, she was a Chinese history student, but after taking several Japanese courses during her master’s program, decided to transfer to Japanese literature. She is interested in women’s literature, zainichi literature, feminism, and affect theory.
Andre Haag is an assistant professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Haag’s research explores how the annexation of Korea and internalization of the “Korea Problem” affected production of literature, culture, vocabularies, and colonial common sense within the Japanese imperial metropole by unleashing narratives of anxiety, resistance, and “terror.” He is completing a book manuscript titled Fear and Loathing in Imperial Japan: Culture, Affect and Korean Peril.
Nathaniel Heneghan received his PhD from the University of Southern California and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese at Murray State University. His research encompasses cinema studies, postcolonial theory, and gender studies. His writing is scheduled to appear in the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema and he is currently revising his dissertation, which considers the changing representation of zainichi Korean identity in postwar literature and film.
So Hye Kim is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations of the University of Chicago with a view to specializing in Korean and East Asian films of diaspora. Her dissertation entitled “Cinematic Return of Korean Diaspora in Post-Cold War East Asia” looks at mobility of Korean diasporic films in the East Asian context. Prior to enrolling at University of Chicago, Kim worked as a programmer for various independent film festivals and Independent Film Theater in Korea.
Nayoung Aimee Kwon is Associate Professor of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Program in the Arts of the Moving Image, and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan (Duke University Press, 2015, Korean translation from Somyông Press 2018) and a co-editor (with Takashi Fujitani) of Transcolonial Film Co-productions in the Japanese Empire. Her publications have also appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Social Text, Sanghô Hakpo, Hanguk Munhak Yôngu, Modern Fiction Studies, etc.
Catherine Ryu is associate professor of Japanese culture and literature at Michigan State University. Her research and teaching interests include Heian narratives, Japanese court poetry, zainichi literature, gender studies, translation studies, game studies, second language learning, global studies, and digital humanities.
Cindi Textor is an assistant professor of Japanese literature and culture in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on the problem of assimilation and representations of difference in writing by Zainichi and colonial Koreans.
Koji Toba is a professor of Japanese literature at the School of Letters, Arts and Sciences at Waseda University. Initially, he started his research focusing on Abe Kōbō and his contemporaries, then gradually extended his field of research to the cultural and political movements of the 1950s. He has been researching circle movements, reportage and documentary films, and authors such as Sugiura Minpei, Ishikawa Jun, Kaikō Takeshi, Fuji Masaharu, Komatsu Sakyō, and Ōta Yōko.
Christina Yi is an assistant professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. in Modern Japanese Literature from Columbia University. Her research primarily focuses on Japanese-language literature by ethnic Korean writers from the 1930s to the present. Her most recent publication is a monograph entitled Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea (Columbia University Press, forthcoming).
Shoya Unoda is an associate professor of Japanese studies at the Graduate School of Letters, Osaka University. He specializes in Japanese intellectual history. He has been working on postwar Japanese social movements, with special focus on the cultural activism by Zainichi Koreans in the 1950s.
Kaveh Askari is an associate professor of English at Michigan State University. He is author of Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood (BFI, 2014), editor of a special issue of Early Popular Visual Culture on the Middle East and North Africa (2008), and co-editor of Performing New Media, 1890-1915 (John Libbey, 2014). He is currently working on a book on the circulation of films and film technologies in midcentury Iran.
Kirsten Fermaglich has taught history and Jewish Studies at Michigan State since 2001. She has written about American Holocaust memory, antisemitism in the United States, and Jews and feminism. Her first book, American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares, was published by Brandeis University Press in 2006, and her most recent book, A Rosenberg By Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in the United States, is forthcoming from NYU Press in Fall 2018.
Danny Méndez's research focuses on contemporary narrative representations of Dominican migrations to the United States and Puerto Rico, analyzing the particular ways in which these narratives challenge conceptions of Latin American literature and Latino Studies. In his first book, Narratives of Migration and Displacements in Dominican Literature (Routledge 2012), Méndez argues that the space of immigration, encountered in the United States and Puerto Rico, allows for multiple ethnic and racial interactions (contacts) that in turn affect the ways in which Dominicans negotiate their national, racial, sexual and ethnic identities both in the island and its diasporic communities.
Sheng-mei Ma is Professor of English at Michigan State University in Michigan, USA, specializing in Asian Diaspora and East-West comparative studies. His books in English include: Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017); The Last Isle (2015); Alienglish (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012); Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011); East-West Montage (2007); The Deathly Embrace (2000); and Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998).
Anna Pegler-Gordon is an Associate Professor at Michigan State University, teaching in the James Madison College and Asian Pacific American Studies Program. She is the author of In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of US Immigration Policy (University of California Press, 2009) and is currently completing a book project about Asians at Ellis Island. She is also researching Japanese American curfew resistance during World War II, which includes practices of passing.
Youngju Ryu is Associate Professor of Korean Literature and the Director of the Korean Language Program at the University of Michigan. Her first book, Writers of the Winter Republic: Literature and Resistance in Park Chung Hee's Korea, was named Best Books of 2016 by Foreign Affairs and received the 2018 James H. Palais Prize of the Association of Asian Studies. She is the editor of Cultures of Yusin: South Korea in the 1970s, forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press, and is currently at work on the phenomenon of "laughtivism" in South Korean democratization.
Johanna Schuster-Craig's research focuses on integration politics in Germany, both from the top-down (government policies and programs) and the bottom-up (social work projects and artist responses). She is also interested in race/racism/whiteness in Germany after 1989, ethnographic fieldwork methods, and the far-right German responses to refugees.
Jyotsna Singh teaches and researches early modern literature and, especially, Shakespeare, colonial history, travel writing, postcolonial theory, early modern histories of Islam, and gender and race studies, often exploring the intersections of these fields.
MODERATORS
Marc Bernstein is a scholar of Judaic and Islamic civilizations, and teaches courses on Hebrew and Israeli cultural studies, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the “Abrahamic” traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His book, Stories of Joseph: Narrative Migrations between Judaism and Islam, examined the interdependence of the Muslim and Jewish traditions about the biblical and quranic figure of Joseph, focusing on a nineteenth-century, Judeo-Arabic manuscript from Cairo.
Ethan Segal is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Japan Council at Michigan State University. He earned his Ph.D. at Stanford and published his first book, Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan, with Harvard. Topics of his research and teaching include pre-modern trade and international relations, women and gender, depictions of Japan in film, and efforts at recovery following the 2011 triple disasters.
Naoko Wake is an Associate Professor of history at Michigan State University. She specializes in the history of medicine, gender, sexuality in the United States and the Pacific Rim. She is currently working on a monograph Bombing Americans: Gender and Trans-Pacific Remembering after World War II, which explores the history of Japanese American and Korean American survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings with a focus on their cross-national and gendered memory, identity, and activism.
Nobuko Yamasaki is an Assistant Professor of Japanese at Lehigh University. Her current project, “Fragmenting History: Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of Empire,” examines women’s bodies as battlefields, where asymmetrical power dynamics meet, compete and complicate one another, producing narratives to be challenged, fragmented, and re-articulated from within. It argues that the Japanese empire’s legacies prevail even today.