BIOS
Lani ALDEN
Lani Alden received her undergraduate training at the University of Maryland College Park. She then received a Master of Arts at Yale in East Asian studies, wherein she focused on premodern Japanese and Chinese literature. Currently, she studies the intersections of gender, science, and theatre in early modern and modern Japan at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Pontus ANDERSSON
Pontus Andersson was born in Malmö, Sweden. He was educated at Lund University, Sweden, and Nagoya University, Japan, and presently active at University of Helsinki in Finland within the framework of the Doctoral Programme of Language Studies, specialising in Japanese linguistics and gender. His primary areas of interest are language ideology, gender ideology, linguistic performativity, and teaching Japanese.
Pedro BASSOE
Pedro Bassoe received his M.A. from the University of Oregon and is currently writing his doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the relationship of text and image and the use of illustration in modern Japanese literature, particularly in the work of Izumi Kyōka, Ozaki Kōyō, and Tsubouchi Shōyō. His research interests include space, visuality, the intersection of art history and literature, the influence of theater on the formation of the novel, and the culture and history of publication in Japan.
Valerie BLACK
Valerie Black is a sociocultural anthropology doctoral student at UC Berkeley whose research interests include mental health, human-technology relationships, selfhood, self-tracking, disability, augmentation, and futurism. She received an MA in Asian Studies at UC Berkeley in 2014 for research linking the postwar experiences of hibakusha to the formation of PTSD as a DSM diagnostic category, in order to critique the concept of ‘resilience’—and the implicit accountability of mothers for ensuring it—in post-3/11 public health initiatives aimed at preventing children’s PTSD. She leads the Townsend Center Japan Studies Working Group, and served as a past organizer of the CJS graduate conference.
Caitlin CASIELLO
Caitlin Casiello is a second year Ph.D. student in the Combined Program in East Asian Languages & Literatures and Film & Media Studies at Yale University. Her M.A. thesis, completed in Harvard University’s Regional Studies East Asia program, focused on the legal entanglements and visual construction of arousal in Japanese pornographic manga. Her current research interests include Japanese pornography (live action, animated, pink, adult video) and queer filmmaking in Japan. She has also assisted with the creation of a Japanese LGBTQ ephemera archive at Yale University Manuscripts & Archives and recently has been writing a great deal about Yuri!!! On Ice.
Deirdre CLYDE
After many years in event management producing environmental theater, and a stint in high tech administration in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, Deirdre returned to school to embark on a third career, as an academic. She did her undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, and received an MA from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, both in cultural anthropology. She is currently continuing on in the PhD program at UH Manoa. Her research interests include Japanese popular culture, fandom, queer theory, and the anthropology of identity, emotion, and ethics. She also teaches LGBT anthropology at City College of San Francisco.
Hannah E. DODD
Hannah E. Dodd is a Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures at The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on the use and perception of yakuwarigo ("role language") in popular media, particularly with regard to language ideologies concerning gender and sexuality.
Stephanie HOHLIOS
Stephanie M. Hohlios is a second-year History of Art Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the visual and material culture and reception of performance in post-1945 Japan. Interested in both popular and avant-garde modes of performance and expression, and confluences and collaborations between the two, her current research explores the visuality, ethics, and collaborative underground sphere of postwar itinerant theaters and mobile performance events.
Andrea HORBINSKI
Andrea Horbinski is a PhD candidate in modern Japanese history with a designated emphasis in New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, “Manga’s Global Century,” is a history of Japanese comics. She has discussed anime, manga, fandom, and Japanese history at conventions and conferences on five continents, and her articles have appeared in Transformative Works and Cultures, Convergence, and Mechademia.
Asheli MOSLEY
Asheli Mosley is a graduate from Georgetown University (BA) and International Christian University (MA). The research she is presenting was conducted in her MA program, however, her research question developed during her BA studies and after she graduated from her BA program. She appreciates the opportunity to fully share her research findings, methodology and conclusions at the UC Berkeley Center for Japanese Studies with the hopes of gaining enough interest in her topic to support her endeavors to gain funding to conduct this experiment on a more generalized external sample.
Kim McNELLY
Kim Mc Nelly is a second-year Ph.D. student at UCLA in the Asian Languages & Cultures department. She completed her MA at the University of British Columbia (2015). Her research focuses on medieval Japanese women’s writing with an emphasis on narratives related to war and grief. She plans to make a comparative study between the expression of grief in male kanbun diaries with poetic writings by women.
Sayo SAKAMOTO
Sayo Sakamoto started her graduate studies in the department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington in Fall 2015. Her primary research interest is Japanese popular music in the postwar period, particularly enka (Japanese ballad). In her research she explores representations of responses to social and cultural changes and how gender and ethnomusicological issues entwined in musical performances. Her recent research paper examines a triangular relation between an enka singer Fuji Keiko (1951-2013), Shinjuku, and furusato (hometowns). Currently, she has been working on melodramatic narratives and images of tragic characters in ninkyō film and enka.
Kirsten SEUFFERT
Kirsten Seuffert is a PhD student in the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California specializing in Japanese cinema and culture. She received an MA in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2016, completing an MA thesis that explores the cinema of filmmaker and screenwriter Adachi Masao through concepts of agency and alterity. Her research interests include avant-garde, political, and transnational cinema, visual culture, film and media theory, gender and sexuality, and postcolonial studies.
Wakako SUZUKI
Wakako Suzuki received her Bachelor of Arts in German Literature from Rikkyo University and her Master of Arts in Japanese Literature from Stanford University. She is interested in the role of translation and adaptation in Japanese literature, with a particular focus on the shifting concept of authors and authorship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among her interests is included the adaptation of folklore in modern Japanese literature.
Justine WIESINGER
Justine Wiesinger is a PhD candidate at Yale University. Her dissertation examines the response to 3.11 in Japanese theater and film. She pays particular attention to the interaction of space, time, gender and embodiment as technical aspects of performance media and as ideas in flux on the post-3.11 stage and in the larger discourse.