ProfessorAdjunct Associate Professor, Global Studies
Research
My research primarily focuses on the East Asia region between 1895, when Japan began its project to colonize Taiwan, Manchuria, and Korea, and 1945, when the Allied Powers dismantled Japan’s extensive empire. I explore colonially inflected transformations in political and economic organization, philosophy, psychology, and literature, and focus on gender, sexuality, and ethnicity to carefully situate Japan’s rise to power. This work draws on my extensive academic training in the United States, France, and Japan; fluency in Japanese, proficiency in Chinese, and basic reading skills in Korean; and over five years of archival and field research in Japan and China. My published work cuts across several disciplines: postcolonial studies, cultural history, critical race and ethnicity studies, Asian studies, philosophy, and literature.
Courses
ASIA 57: First-Year Seminar: Dis-Orienting the Orient
ASIA 233: Drugs, Sex, and Sovereignty in East Asia, 1800-1945
JAPN 277: Empire of Sex: Eroticism, Mass Culture, and Geopolitics in Japan, 1945-Present
JAPN 375: The Culture of Modern, Imperial Japan, 1900-1945
Publications
My most recent book, published by Duke University Press in 2010, is Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895-1945.
