Speaker Bios
Professor Christine Marran, University of Minnesota, Asian Languages and Literatures
Christine Marran is an associate professor in Japanese literature and cultural studies at the University of Minnesota. Her first book, Poison Woman: Figuring the Transgressive Woman, investigates the powerful icon of the transgressive woman, its shifting meanings, and its influence on defining women’s sexuality and place from its inception in the 1870s. Marran’s work since the publication of her book on gender has primarily turned to the study of the environmental aesthetics and the place of animals in Japanese literature and visual culture. She is currently completing a book manuscript on writers and filmmakers whose work represents what she calls the environmental turn in literature and culture in Japan’s postwar industrial period. She argues that this turn marks a shift in writing on nature and the environment. The material world of nature as described as a system“”its ecological principles that signal feedback loops and symbiotic relations“”are the foundation for this new aesthetics of the environmental turn that works in the modality of the bios. She shows how, prior to this environmental turn, philosophers and writers throughout Japan’s industrial history have mused about Japan and its nature plenty but this conjuring of nature has been, in the main, toward an articulation of nature for human culture“”a particular insistence on nature as symbol, metaphor, or place name rather than a material environment that connects the human to the biotic world. She rethinks the literary canon and national cinema and shows that works of the environmental turn are not limited to depicting human culture in terms of ethnic or national belonging. Rather, they demand new protocols for reading and viewing that encourage an understanding of biotic relations, which include but inevitably trump ethnic and national ones. Gender continues to be an important element in her work for understanding the ways in which toxins and other material aspects of industrial culture affects bodies differently. She has also written various articles on dolphins, wolves, insects, and other creatures in literary and visual culture.
Brian Hurley, UC Berkeley, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Brian’s research focuses on the literary and intellectual life of Japan in the 1920s-1940s. It brings together analyses of expository cultural critique and close readings of literary writing in order to understand the value of aesthetic language within a synchronic sphere of communication. This approach leads to a larger reflection on the possibility and peril of a non-teleological narrative of 1930s culture and politics. Working through these problems, his dissertation examines the writings of Yamada Yoshio, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Tosaka Jun, Nakano Shigeharu, Miki Kiyoshi and Yokomitsu Riichi. His article, “Toward a New Modern Vernacular: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yamada Yoshio and Shōwa Restoration Thought,” appeared in The Journal of Japanese Studies in Summer 2013.
Brian has taught courses on premodern Japanese literature in translation and modern Japanese literary language at Arizona State, and a course on Japanese Naturalism at the University of San Francisco. With the support of a Fulbright, he will be a visiting researcher at Waseda during academic year 2014-2015.
Rika Hiro, University of Southern California, Art History
Rika's primary field of research is Japanese art and visual culture of the 1960s and 1970s. She is currently working on a dissertation, which looks at radiation and the aftereffects of the atomic bomb in postwar period art in Japan. Before coming to USC, she co-founded the non-profit art space Art2102 of Los Angeles in historic Boyle Heights. She is a regular contributor to contemporary art magazine Bijutsu Techō, and co-curated Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950-1970 and Radical Communication: Japanese Video Art, 1968-1988 at the Getty Research Institute (2007) and Censored at The Box (2010).
Shelby Oxenford, UC Berkeley, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Shelby specializes in modern Japanese literature. She received her B.A. in both Japanese and Political Science from Berkeley in 2009, completing an honors thesis focused on the role of imagination in remembering the past in selected works of Ôe Kenzaburô. She received her M.A. in Japanese from Berkeley in 2013 after completing an M.A. thesis examining the initial literary responses to the March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident in northeastern Japan. She is interested in representations of traumatic experience and how such experience is inscribed into language and narrative. She is especially interested the tension between the questions of what it may mean to have justice and what it may mean to have healing in the aftermath of traumatic experience.
Deirdre Martin, UC Berkeley, Political Science
Coming soon
Dustin Wright, UC Santa Cruz, History
Dustin specializes in modern Japanese history. He recently returned from Tokyo where he spent the last year as Fulbright-Hays fellow at Waseda University and is currently writing his dissertation on the vibrant history of anti-military base protests in western Tokyo. The dissertation project, though firmly grounded in multiple archival sources, also incorporates interviews with activists from around Japan and draws from conceptual methodologies in critical geography and urban studies. His previous works on anti-base activism and U.S. imperialism in Okinawa have appeared in Critical Asian Studies and Sekai. In his spare time he enjoys cycling and shooing squirrels away from his tomatoes.
Brad Holland and Chika Ogawa, Harvard University, Government
Bradley's research focuses broadly on the relationship between private violence, order, and property rights. He studies these issues both in the context of contemporary drug trafficking and historical state building.
Chika's main research interest concerns how incumbent and oppositional groups build and maintain alliances across central, regional, and local arenas. Her dissertation engages with this topic by examining how national-level political parties use local governments in contemporary Japan and Britain. She is also interested in the relationship between fertility decisions and welfare states, the interaction between political parties and bureaucracies from the early 20th century to today, and the political economy of advanced democracies more generally. She received her B.A.s in Comparative Politics and Japanese Studies at UC San Diego.
Michael Craig, UC Berkeley, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Mike tends to position his work at the intersections of visual culture, narratology, aesthetics, and ludology. His dissertation examines Japanese Role-Playing Games of the late 1990s, exploring how the videogame industry’s shift towards a three-dimensional standard of game environment design resonates with the increasingly complex human-world interactions depicted in popular media narratives of the same period, notably in the genre of sekai-kei. In particular, he is interested in how the fractured narrative structures of such games may complicate videogame theory’s prevailing tendency to read 3D as facilitating a player’s seamless immersion in optically continuous (and thus fluidly actionable) worlds. Other interests include postwar fiction, the histories of psychology and modern philosophy, theories of the comic, and the portrayal of consciousness in the novels of Sōseki and Kawabata.
Xindi Qin, Yale University, East Asian Studies
Xindi's studies focus on contemporary popular culture in Japan and China, and how people with different cultural backgrounds consume cultural products. She received her B.A. in English Language and Literature from Shanghai International Studies University in China.
Aaron Jasny, Washington University in St. Louis, Japanese Language and Literature
Aaron's primary research interest is in writing about nature and the environment by modern Japanese writers, in particular the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century naturalists, geographers, mountaineers, etc. who wrote about Japan's natural environment. He is interested in how writers like these may have contributed to a shift in the conceptualization of the human relationship to the natural environment in Japan at that time. His other interests include folklore studies and literary adaptations of folk tales, and the relationship/distinction between "popular" and "pure" literature.
John Leisure, UCLA, History
John's emphasis is on modern Japan. He is researching the emergence of middle class consumer households in postwar Japan using danchi apartment complexes as a site of social change. Prior to joining UCLA, John received a MA in Regional Studies East Asia from Columbia University and a BA in History and Political Science from the University of Southern California.
Bonnie McClure, University of Washington, Japanese Literature
Bonnie is interested mostly in poetry, particularly the development of linked-verse poetics during the medieval and early Edo eras and the crossover between poetry and religion throughout the history of pre-modern literature. She is currently working on her M.A. thesis on a sequence of Buddhist waka by Saigyō.
Justus Watt, UC Berkeley, History
Justus' primary research focus is on pre-1937 Sino-Japanese relations with a concentration on the Japanese empire and cross-cultural interaction.
Jooyeon Hahm, University of Pennsylvania, History
Born in Seoul, and raised in parts of Korea and Japan, Jooyeon came to the United States in 2004. She earned a bachelor’s degree in History and East Asian Area Studies from University of Pennsylvania in 2012, and started a doctoral program at the same institution in the same year. Now a second-year graduate student in the History department, she has done research on the public prostitution system in Japan and Korea in the early 20th century. The paper she is presenting at this conference is a variation of this research. Currently, she is working on two papers titled, “The Status of Concubine, Wife, and Women in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945” and “Politics of Illegitimacy: Motherless and Fatherless Children in the Japanese Household Registration, 1868—1945.” Ultimately, she would like to study the changing legal and social meaning of marriage in the Japanese empire.
Michael Thornton, Harvard University, History
Michael graduated from Yale in 2010 with a degree in History. After graduating, he spent one semester as a visiting student at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and then the spring of 2011 in Japan. He has been at Harvard pursuing a PhD since autumn 2011. His research interests focus on early modern and modern Japan, particularly Japanese urban history, with comparative interests in urban theory and modern Chinese history. His dissertation is tentatively titled “Sapporo: Building City, State and Empire, 1850-1900”.
Christine Marran is an associate professor in Japanese literature and cultural studies at the University of Minnesota. Her first book, Poison Woman: Figuring the Transgressive Woman, investigates the powerful icon of the transgressive woman, its shifting meanings, and its influence on defining women’s sexuality and place from its inception in the 1870s. Marran’s work since the publication of her book on gender has primarily turned to the study of the environmental aesthetics and the place of animals in Japanese literature and visual culture. She is currently completing a book manuscript on writers and filmmakers whose work represents what she calls the environmental turn in literature and culture in Japan’s postwar industrial period. She argues that this turn marks a shift in writing on nature and the environment. The material world of nature as described as a system“”its ecological principles that signal feedback loops and symbiotic relations“”are the foundation for this new aesthetics of the environmental turn that works in the modality of the bios. She shows how, prior to this environmental turn, philosophers and writers throughout Japan’s industrial history have mused about Japan and its nature plenty but this conjuring of nature has been, in the main, toward an articulation of nature for human culture“”a particular insistence on nature as symbol, metaphor, or place name rather than a material environment that connects the human to the biotic world. She rethinks the literary canon and national cinema and shows that works of the environmental turn are not limited to depicting human culture in terms of ethnic or national belonging. Rather, they demand new protocols for reading and viewing that encourage an understanding of biotic relations, which include but inevitably trump ethnic and national ones. Gender continues to be an important element in her work for understanding the ways in which toxins and other material aspects of industrial culture affects bodies differently. She has also written various articles on dolphins, wolves, insects, and other creatures in literary and visual culture.
Brian Hurley, UC Berkeley, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Brian’s research focuses on the literary and intellectual life of Japan in the 1920s-1940s. It brings together analyses of expository cultural critique and close readings of literary writing in order to understand the value of aesthetic language within a synchronic sphere of communication. This approach leads to a larger reflection on the possibility and peril of a non-teleological narrative of 1930s culture and politics. Working through these problems, his dissertation examines the writings of Yamada Yoshio, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Tosaka Jun, Nakano Shigeharu, Miki Kiyoshi and Yokomitsu Riichi. His article, “Toward a New Modern Vernacular: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yamada Yoshio and Shōwa Restoration Thought,” appeared in The Journal of Japanese Studies in Summer 2013.
Brian has taught courses on premodern Japanese literature in translation and modern Japanese literary language at Arizona State, and a course on Japanese Naturalism at the University of San Francisco. With the support of a Fulbright, he will be a visiting researcher at Waseda during academic year 2014-2015.
Rika Hiro, University of Southern California, Art History
Rika's primary field of research is Japanese art and visual culture of the 1960s and 1970s. She is currently working on a dissertation, which looks at radiation and the aftereffects of the atomic bomb in postwar period art in Japan. Before coming to USC, she co-founded the non-profit art space Art2102 of Los Angeles in historic Boyle Heights. She is a regular contributor to contemporary art magazine Bijutsu Techō, and co-curated Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950-1970 and Radical Communication: Japanese Video Art, 1968-1988 at the Getty Research Institute (2007) and Censored at The Box (2010).
Shelby Oxenford, UC Berkeley, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Shelby specializes in modern Japanese literature. She received her B.A. in both Japanese and Political Science from Berkeley in 2009, completing an honors thesis focused on the role of imagination in remembering the past in selected works of Ôe Kenzaburô. She received her M.A. in Japanese from Berkeley in 2013 after completing an M.A. thesis examining the initial literary responses to the March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident in northeastern Japan. She is interested in representations of traumatic experience and how such experience is inscribed into language and narrative. She is especially interested the tension between the questions of what it may mean to have justice and what it may mean to have healing in the aftermath of traumatic experience.
Deirdre Martin, UC Berkeley, Political Science
Coming soon
Dustin Wright, UC Santa Cruz, History
Dustin specializes in modern Japanese history. He recently returned from Tokyo where he spent the last year as Fulbright-Hays fellow at Waseda University and is currently writing his dissertation on the vibrant history of anti-military base protests in western Tokyo. The dissertation project, though firmly grounded in multiple archival sources, also incorporates interviews with activists from around Japan and draws from conceptual methodologies in critical geography and urban studies. His previous works on anti-base activism and U.S. imperialism in Okinawa have appeared in Critical Asian Studies and Sekai. In his spare time he enjoys cycling and shooing squirrels away from his tomatoes.
Brad Holland and Chika Ogawa, Harvard University, Government
Bradley's research focuses broadly on the relationship between private violence, order, and property rights. He studies these issues both in the context of contemporary drug trafficking and historical state building.
Chika's main research interest concerns how incumbent and oppositional groups build and maintain alliances across central, regional, and local arenas. Her dissertation engages with this topic by examining how national-level political parties use local governments in contemporary Japan and Britain. She is also interested in the relationship between fertility decisions and welfare states, the interaction between political parties and bureaucracies from the early 20th century to today, and the political economy of advanced democracies more generally. She received her B.A.s in Comparative Politics and Japanese Studies at UC San Diego.
Michael Craig, UC Berkeley, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Mike tends to position his work at the intersections of visual culture, narratology, aesthetics, and ludology. His dissertation examines Japanese Role-Playing Games of the late 1990s, exploring how the videogame industry’s shift towards a three-dimensional standard of game environment design resonates with the increasingly complex human-world interactions depicted in popular media narratives of the same period, notably in the genre of sekai-kei. In particular, he is interested in how the fractured narrative structures of such games may complicate videogame theory’s prevailing tendency to read 3D as facilitating a player’s seamless immersion in optically continuous (and thus fluidly actionable) worlds. Other interests include postwar fiction, the histories of psychology and modern philosophy, theories of the comic, and the portrayal of consciousness in the novels of Sōseki and Kawabata.
Xindi Qin, Yale University, East Asian Studies
Xindi's studies focus on contemporary popular culture in Japan and China, and how people with different cultural backgrounds consume cultural products. She received her B.A. in English Language and Literature from Shanghai International Studies University in China.
Aaron Jasny, Washington University in St. Louis, Japanese Language and Literature
Aaron's primary research interest is in writing about nature and the environment by modern Japanese writers, in particular the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century naturalists, geographers, mountaineers, etc. who wrote about Japan's natural environment. He is interested in how writers like these may have contributed to a shift in the conceptualization of the human relationship to the natural environment in Japan at that time. His other interests include folklore studies and literary adaptations of folk tales, and the relationship/distinction between "popular" and "pure" literature.
John Leisure, UCLA, History
John's emphasis is on modern Japan. He is researching the emergence of middle class consumer households in postwar Japan using danchi apartment complexes as a site of social change. Prior to joining UCLA, John received a MA in Regional Studies East Asia from Columbia University and a BA in History and Political Science from the University of Southern California.
Bonnie McClure, University of Washington, Japanese Literature
Bonnie is interested mostly in poetry, particularly the development of linked-verse poetics during the medieval and early Edo eras and the crossover between poetry and religion throughout the history of pre-modern literature. She is currently working on her M.A. thesis on a sequence of Buddhist waka by Saigyō.
Justus Watt, UC Berkeley, History
Justus' primary research focus is on pre-1937 Sino-Japanese relations with a concentration on the Japanese empire and cross-cultural interaction.
Jooyeon Hahm, University of Pennsylvania, History
Born in Seoul, and raised in parts of Korea and Japan, Jooyeon came to the United States in 2004. She earned a bachelor’s degree in History and East Asian Area Studies from University of Pennsylvania in 2012, and started a doctoral program at the same institution in the same year. Now a second-year graduate student in the History department, she has done research on the public prostitution system in Japan and Korea in the early 20th century. The paper she is presenting at this conference is a variation of this research. Currently, she is working on two papers titled, “The Status of Concubine, Wife, and Women in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945” and “Politics of Illegitimacy: Motherless and Fatherless Children in the Japanese Household Registration, 1868—1945.” Ultimately, she would like to study the changing legal and social meaning of marriage in the Japanese empire.
Michael Thornton, Harvard University, History
Michael graduated from Yale in 2010 with a degree in History. After graduating, he spent one semester as a visiting student at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and then the spring of 2011 in Japan. He has been at Harvard pursuing a PhD since autumn 2011. His research interests focus on early modern and modern Japan, particularly Japanese urban history, with comparative interests in urban theory and modern Chinese history. His dissertation is tentatively titled “Sapporo: Building City, State and Empire, 1850-1900”.