Speakers

Ayako Saito (Meiji Gakuin University)

Ayako Saito is a professor in the Department of Art Studies at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan, specializing in film studies. Her publications include “Hitchcock’s Trilogy: A Logic of Mise-en-Scène” (Endless Night: Parallel Histories, Cinema and Psychoanalysis, University of California Press, 1999), “Reading as Woman: The Collaboration of Ayako Wakao and Masumura Yasuzo” (Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film Theory, Wayne State University Press, 2010), and “Occupation and Memory: The Representation of Woman’s Body in Postwar Japanese Cinema” (The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, Oxford University Press, 2014). She has also edited Film and Body/Sexuality (Shinwasha, 2006), co-edited Invisibility: Representation of Invisible Race—Dismantling the Race Myth Vol.1 (University of Tokyo Press, 2016), and co-authored many books, including Wakao Ayako Film Actress (Misuzu Shobo, 2003) and Male Bonding: East Asian Cinema and Homosociality (Heibonsha, 2004).

Diane Lewis (Washington University in St. Louis)

Diane Wei Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She specializes in film and media cultures in Japan, with a focus on gender, emotion, and labor. Her essays have appeared in Cinema Journal, positions: asia critique, Feminist Media Histories, and Screen. She is author of Powers of the Real: Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2019) and is currently working on two projects: one on Prokino and one on women’s labor and 1980s information technology.

Aaron Gerow (Yale University)

Aaron Gerow is Professor of East Asian cinema and culture at Yale University. His books include Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925 (2010); Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies (co-authored with Markus Nornes, 2009 [Japanese version 2016]); A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan (2008); and Kitano Takeshi (2007). His co-edited anthology Rediscovering Classical Japanese Film Theory—An Anthology (in Japanese) appeared in 2018.

Toba Koji (Waseda University)

Dr. Koji Toba is a Professor of Japanese Literature at the School of Letters, Arts and Sciences at Waseda University. 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. His publications include Undōtai: Abe Kōbō (Moving Body: ABE Kōbō, Ichiyōsha, 2007) and 1950 nen-dai: “Kiroku” no jidai (The 1950s: An Age of “Document,” Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2010). He also co-edited Tenkeiki no mediologii: 1950 nen-dai Nihon no geijutsu to media no saihensei (Mediology in a Transformative Period: Reconfiguration of Japanese Art and Media in the 1950s, Shinwasha, 2019).

Namiko Kunimoto (Ohio State University)

Namiko Kunimoto is a specialist in modern and contemporary Japanese art, with research interests in gender, race, urbanization, photography, visual culture, performance art, transnationalism, and nation formation. She is the Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies at Ohio State University and Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art. Her essays include “Olympic Dissent: Art, Politics, and the Tokyo Games” in Asia Pacific Japan Focus, “Tactics and Strategies: Chen Qiulin and the Production of Space” in Art Journal and “Tanaka Atsuko and the Circuits of Subjectivity” in Art Bulletin. Dr. Kunimoto’s awards include a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship, Japan Foundation Fellowships (2007 and 2016), a College Art Association Millard/Meiss Author Award (2017), and the Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award (2019). She has been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and is the Vice-President of the Japanese Art History Forum. Her book, The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art, was published in February 2017 by the University of Minnesota Press and she is currently working on her next book, Transpacific Erasures: Contemporary Art, Gender, Race, and the Afterlives of Japanese Imperialism.

Junko Yamazaki (UCLA)

Junko Yamazaki is an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Her research and teaching lie at the intersection of film and media aesthetics, technology, and modern Japanese history and culture. An interdisciplinary scholar by training (PhD in Cinema and Media Studies & East Asian Studies), she examines Japanese cinema and media in relation to broader historical and theoretical issues and debates particularly concerning questions of modernity, mass culture, subjectivity, and gender and sexuality. Her most advanced project is Out of the Past: Jidaigeki, Modern Historicity, and the Aesthetics of the Present in Postwar Japan, a book manuscript that investigates the postwar revival of jidaigeki, a category of film that emerged in the early 1920s and that gradually came to refer to period films set prior to Japan’s Meiji Restoration of 1868.

Mizukoshi Shin (University of Tokyo)

Shin Mizukoshi is a professor of media studies at the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, the University of Tokyo. He has been working on critical and practical media studies to try to defamiliarize and recombine the relationship between media and people with a design-oriented mind. His most recent English article is “Media Landscape without Apple: A Workshop for Critical Awareness of Alternative Media Infrastructure” The Journal of Education, 3(2), Gyeongin National University of Education, 2020, and Japanese publication is Mizukoshi, S., Iida, Y., and Liu X. Media ron (Media Studies), Tokyo: Hosodaigaku Kyoiku Shinkokai (Open University of Japan Publication), 2018. He is the editor of an independent and bilingual little magazine, “5: Designing Media Ecology,” and a producer of online sound media, “Radio 5” (http://www.fivedme.org).

Alexander Zahlten (Harvard University)

Alexander Zahlten is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His work centers on film and media in East Asia, with a focus on Japan and currently explores the transition from media environment to media ecology and “amateur” film production. Publications include the co-edited volume Media Theory in Japan (Duke University Press, 2017, with Marc Steinberg) and the monograph The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media Ecologies (Duke University Press, 2017). He was Program Director for the Nippon Connection Film Festival, the largest festival for film from Japan, from 2002 to 2010.

Yuriko Furuhata (McGill University)

Yuriko Furuhata is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar of Cinema and Media History in East Asian Studies and an associate member of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her first book, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Duke University Press, 2013), won the Best First Book Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Her second book, entitled Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control (Duke University Press, 2022) examines geopolitical connections across environmental art, weather control, digital computing, and cybernetic architecture in Japan and the United States. She is currently working on a new book project, titled Enchanted Consultation, which explores the cultural techniques of divination as media.

Hideaki Fujiki (Nagoya University)

Hideaki Fujiki is professor of cinema studies at the Center for Transregional Culture and Society, the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University. His publications include Making Audiences: A Social History of Japanese Cinema and Media (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), and The Japanese Cinema Book co-edited with Alastair Phillips (British Film Institute, 2020). He is currently completing a monograph provisionally titled Radioactive Documentaries: Ecology from Fukushima to the Globe. His latest article, “Cinematically Mediated Radioactive Waste: Eco-cinema Criticism, Global Ethical Imaginations, Charka (2016),” (in Japanese) appears in JunCture: Chōikiteki Nihon bunka kenkyū12 (March 2021).

Jennifer Coates (University of Sheffield)

Jennifer Coates is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield. She is the author of Making Icons: Repetition and the Female Image in Japanese Cinema, 1945-1964 (Hong Kong University Press 2016), as well as a number of journal articles and book chapters on cinema and audiences in postwar and contemporary Japan. Her current ethnographic research project focuses on early postwar film audiences in Japan.

Alastair Phillips (University of Warwick)

Alastair Phillips is Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. His research interests lie in the fields of international film history, culture, and aesthetics with special emphasis on French and Japanese filmmaking and questions of place, location, mobility, and landscape. He is the co-editor (with Julian Stringer) of Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts (2007) and (with Hideaki Fujiki) The Japanese Cinema Book (2020). He is an editor of Screen.