Bios
Alex Bennett
Alex Bennett was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1970. Bennett received a PhD from Kyoto University (Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies) in 2001 and a second PhD from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand (Doctor of Philosophy in Japanese) in 2012. Specializing in the history of Japanese thought with a focus in samurai culture, Bennett has worked at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies and the Department of Japanese Studies at Teikyo University and is currently a professor in the Division of International Affairs at Kansai University. Recent publications include Hagakure: The Secret Wisdom of the Samurai (Tuttle, 2014), Kendo: Culture of the Sword (California, 2015), Bushido and the Art of Living (Japan Library, 2017), Naginata: History and Practice (Bunkasha International, 2017), Japan: The Ultimate Samurai Survival Guide (Tuttle, 2018), The Complete Musashi: The Book of Five Rings and Other Works (Tuttle, 2018).
Linda Chance
Linda H. Chance is Associate Professor of Japanese Language and Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Her main field is prose of medieval Japan, particularly the random essay form (zuihitsu). She co-edited, with Tetsuko Toda, Phila-Nipponica: An Historic Guide to Philadelphia and Japan (Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia, 2015). They will also co-edit a forthcoming volume on Japan and Philadelphia’s Quaker connections.
Sonia Coman
Sonia Coman’s research focuses on cross-cultural exchanges in the long 19th century, the history of ceramics, and the history of collecting. Coman received a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia, where she wrote her dissertation on a set of Japanese aesthetic principles that spurred a reinvention of French and Japanese ceramics in the late 19th century. At Columbia, she designed and taught an undergraduate seminar on the soft power of ceramic arts across world cultures. In 2018-19, Coman will prepare a book manuscript on the social circles and collecting choices behind Charles Lang Freer’s Japanese ceramics as the Anne van Biema Fellow at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Julie Davis
Julie Nelson Davis is Professor of Modern Asian Art, 1600-present, in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research area is the art of the Edo period, focusing on ukiyo-e and illustrated books. She is the author of Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty (Hawaii, 2007) and Partners in Print: Artistic Collaboration and the Ukiyo-e Market (Hawaii, 2015), as well as numerous articles and essays. In 2015, she was guest curator for the exhibition, “Imagining Utamaro: A Japanese Masterpiece Rediscovered,” at the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian. Davis is currently at work on a new book with the working title, Ukiyo-e in Context, and serves as Director of the Penn Forum on Japan.
Frederick R. Dickinson
Frederick R. Dickinson is Professor of Japanese History at the University of Pennsylvania, Co-Director of the Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies, and Deputy Director of the Penn Forum on Japan. He received an MA and PhD in History from Yale University and holds an MA in International Politics from Kyoto University (Kyoto, Japan). He is the author of War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914 – 1919 (Harvard, 1999), Taisho tenno (Taisho Emperor, Minerva, 2009) and World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919-1930 (Cambridge, 2013). He is currently working on a global history of modern Japan.
Felice Fischer
Dr. Felice Fischer is the Luther W. Brady Curator of Japanese Art and Senior Curator of East Asian Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has organized numerous exhibitions, including “Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran: Japanese Masters of the Brush” (2007), the catalogue for which received the 2008 Art Book Award from the Association of Art Historians (Great Britain); “Munakata Shikō, Japanese Master of the Modern Print” (2002); “The Arts of Hon’ami Kōetsu, Japanese Renaissance Master” (2000); and, most recently, the major exhibition “Ink and Gold, Art of the Kano” (2015). In 2013, Dr. Felice Fischer was named to the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays, in recognition of her contributions to cultural exchange in the field of art, and for deepening the appreciation of Japanese culture in the United States.
Chelsea Foxwell
Chelsea Foxwell is Associate Professor of Art History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago, where she specializes in the art of the late Edo and Meiji periods. Her publications include Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hōgai and the Search for Images (Chicago, 2015) and Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints (Chicago, 2012; co-authored with Anne Leonard). She recently completed a Fulbright research fellowship in residence at the University of Tokyo, where she examined the circulation of visual material in painted and woodblock-printed form during the Edo and early Meiji periods.
Ariel Genadt
Ariel Genadt is an architect and a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Architecture. He has also taught at Swarthmore College and the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. His research and teaching focus on the relationships between construction and cultural expression in architecture, with a concentration on modern Japan. He holds a PhD in Architecture from Penn, a Master of Arts in Histories and Theories of Architecture from the Architectural Association, London, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the Technion, Israel. Genadt has worked as an architect for over a decade in Paris and in Jerusalem, on projects in France, Britain, Greece, Israel, Morocco, Senegal, China and Japan. His work has been published in the JSAH, Baumeister, Architect’s Newspaper and Mésologiques. He is curator of the 2018 exhibition Critical Abstractions – Modern Architecture in Japan 1868-2018 at the University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives. He is currently working on a book on the work of Kuma Kengo.
Masako Hamada
Masako Hamada is Associate Professor of Japanese Studies in the Department of Global Interdisciplinary Studies and Director of the Asian Studies Program at Villanova University. She has an MA in Intercultural Communication from the University of Pennsylvania and an EdD in International & Transcultural Studies from Columbia University. She is the author of various articles and books, including Japanese Female Professors in the United States: A Comparative Study in Conflict Resolution and Intercultural Communication (Mellen, 2006) and Japanese Male Professors on American College Campuses: A Comparative Study of Conflict Management (Mellen, 2012). She is a contributing editor, writer, and translator for Phila-Nipponica: An Historic Guide to Philadelphia & Japan (2nd edition, Philadelphia, 2015). She is the translation coordinator for The Eight Female Emperors of Japan: A Brief Introduction to Their Lives and Legacies, (Fuzambo International, 2018).
Robert Hellyer
Robert Hellyer is Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University. His research focuses on early modern and modern Japan, especially socio-economic perspectives related to trade. His publications include Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640-1868 (Harvard, 2009) and numerous articles emerging from his current project exploring Japan’s export of green tea to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Masako Iino
Masako Iino (former President and Professor Emeritus of Tsuda University, Tokyo) has a BA from Tsuda University and MA in American history from Syracuse University, where she was a Fulbright scholar. She has taught American history, U.S.-Japan relations, and immigration studies at Tsuda University for many years. She also taught at McGill University and Acadia University and was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. Her numerous publications include Another History of US-Japan Relations: Japanese Americans Swayed by the Cooperation and the Disputes between the Two Nations (Yuhikaku, 2000). She is currently president of the Japan-U.S. Educational Exchange Promotion Foundation (Fulbright Foundation).
Moriyasu Ito
Moriyasu Ito graduated from Kyoto University with a Bachelor of Laws degree. He entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1993, studied at Trent University in Canada as a trainee, then was posted to Karachi, Pakistan as a cultural attache and vice consul for three years. Back to Tokyo in 1999, he left the Ministry in 2003 and became a Shinto priest at Meiji Jingu after studying at Kokugakuin University. He is Chief of the International Affairs Division at the Meiji Jingu Intercultural Research Institute. He plays the Sho, a Japanese wind instrument resembling panpipes.
Ayako Kano
Ayako Kano is Professor of Japanese Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the Graduate Groups in Comparative Literature and in History, and a core faculty member of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender, performance, and politics. She is the author of Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (Palgrave, 2001) and Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor (Hawaii, 2016), and co-editor of Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (Hawaii, 2018).
Atsuki Katayama
Atsuki Katayama graduated from Kokugakuin University in 2003 and entered Meiji Jingu in the same year. His father serves at the Hitomaro Jinja shrine in Yamaguchi Prefecture, dedicated to the spirit of poet Kakinomoto-no Hitomaro (660-724 CE). Katayama became a Shinto priest in 2008 after serving as a trainee for 5 years at Meiji Jingu. He is currently affiliated with the Ritual Division. He plays the Ryuteki (dragon flute).
Boxi Liu
Boxi Liu is a second-year graduate student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations (EALC) at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies art and archaeology of Northeast Asia from the 2nd through 14th centuries. His research interests include international relations and artistic exchanges among Northeast China, the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago from prehistory to the 12th century.
Yoko Nishimura
Yoko Nishimura is Assistant Professor of Japan Studies at Gettysburg College. Her research focuses on the material culture and everyday activities of non-elite inhabitants in their dwelling and mortuary contexts. Nishimura is particularly interested in quotidian objects used in the houses and graves of Jōmon-period communities in Japan. Her publications include “The Evolution of Curved Beads (Magatama勾玉/曲玉) in Jōmon Period Japan and the Development of Individual Ownership” (Asian Perspective, 2018).
Jonathan Reynolds
Jonathan M. Reynolds is Professor of Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University. His research and teaching focuses on the history of modern Japanese architecture and Japanese photography. His publications include: Allegories of Time and Space: Japanese Identity in Photography and Architecture (Hawaii, 2015) and Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture (California, 2001).
Kikuko Sakamoto
Kikuko Sakamoto attended pre-school through high school at Ochanomizu University and graduated from Gakushuin University, majoring in Philosophy. She has worked for Fuzanbo Publishing Co. for more than 25 years and is now its president. Fuzanbo Publishing Company was founded by Kajima Sakamoto in 1886. Kajima’s hoped to publish good and useful books for the benefit of society, and this philosophy has been carried on by the leaders of the company to the present. Ms. Sakamoto has also been active in the field of education and has contributed to it in various roles, including as Counselor at Sakamoto Houkoukai, as an advisor to the president and a member of the Board of Trustees at Ochanomizu University, and as a member of the Board of Trustees at Junshin Hiro Gakuen.
Jordan Sand
Jordan Sand is Professor of Japanese History and Culture at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He holds a masters degree in architecture history from the University of Tokyo and a doctorate in history from Columbia University. His research focuses on urbanism, material culture and the history of everyday life. He is the author of House and Home in Modern Japan (Harvard, 2004), Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects (California, 2013) and 帝国日本の生活空間 (Living Spaces of Imperial Japan; Iwanami, 2015). He has also published on urban fire and disaster resilience, historical memory, museums and cultural heritage policy, and the history of food. He has served as visiting professor at Sophia University, Waseda University, the University of Tokyo, Michigan University, and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He is presently writing a history of the Ise shrines as well as researching informal settlements in Asian cities.
Naoko Shibusawa
Naoko Shibusawa is Associate Professor of History and American Studies/Ethnics Studies at Brown University. In addition to her first book, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Harvard, 2006), she has written on transnational Asian American identities, Cold War ideologies, the Lavender Scare, and the Kinsey Report. She is currently working on two book manuscripts: Ideologies of U.S. Empire and Queer Betrayals: The Treason Trial of John David Provoo.
Maho Suzuki
Dr. Maho Suzuki is a part-time lecturer at Musashino Art University and curator of the National Diet Library, Japan. In 2013, she organized the exhibition “Copy, Create, Preserve: Records of Archaeological Objects in Modern Japan”, at the Tokyo National Museum as Associate Fellow. In 2015, she presented on “How Archaeological Artifacts Became Art: Jōmon Pottery from Modern to Contemporary Times” at the British Association for Japanese Studies Annual Conference, SOAS. Her new book Jomon doki eno bi no manazashi will be published this year. As a member of the Tokyo National Museum, she is conducting research on the international exchange activities of Japanese museums in the Meiji Era. She has conducted research at the Melbourne Museum, Western Australian Museum, the Glasgow Museums, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
Tetsuko Toda
Tetsuko Toda is professor at Josai International University in Chiba prefecture, Japan. She has published several articles on American Quakers’ missionary activities in Japan, including “Starting as a Women’s Organization: The Formation of the Women’s Foreign Missionary Association of Friends of Philadelphia” (Bulletin of Yamanashi Prefectural University, 2011) and “Conflicting Views on Foreign Missions: The Mission Board of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends in the 1920s” (Quaker History, 2011). She also edited Phila-Nipponica: An Historic Guide to Philadelphia & Japan (Philadelphia, 2015).
Hiroshi Tomita
Hiroshi Tomita is a 7th dan kendo master. Born in Tokyo, he began practicing kendo in middle school. After graduating from Tokyo International University, he spent a career at Ida Technos Corporation, where he learned kendo the hard way from the senior managing director at the time, 9th dan master Narazaki Masahiko. Tomita has served as coach of the Tokyo International University kendo team and of the Ida Technos Corporation club team. He has participated in the National Sports Festival and the Kendo Prefectural Championships and won the Second Annual Masters Club Team Kendo Championship in 1999. He is currently a judge on the kendo rank review board of the Saitama Kendo Association and external instructor for the Kumagaya Fujimi Junior High kendo team.
Alice Y. Tseng
Alice Y. Tseng currently chairs the Department of History of Art & Architecture at Boston University. Her research interests center on Japan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially the role of built spaces and the visual arts in cultural transformation, invention, and revival. Tseng’s book publications include The Imperial Museums of Japan: Architecture and the Art of the Nation (Washington, 2008), Kyoto Visual Culture in the Early Edo and Meiji Periods: The Arts of Reinvention (Routledge, 2016, co-edited with Morgan Pitelka), and Modern Kyoto: Building for Ceremony and Commemoration, 1868-1940 (Hawaii, forthcoming fall 2018).
Takanaga Tsutsumi
Takanaga Tsutsumi lives a life close to Shinto. His mother’s family serves the Kumano-hongu Taisha shrine in Wakayama prefecture. After studying law at Tokai University, Tsutsumi decided to become a Shinto priest and took a one-year intensive ordination course at Kokugakuin University. He has served as a trainee at Meiji Jingu for three years. He plays the Hichiriki (small double-reed instrument).
Hajime Yatsuka
Hajime Yatsuka is an architect and emeritus professor at Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo. His concern as a researcher and critic focuses on architecture and urbanism of 20th century Japan and the world. Among his book publications are: Le Corbusier- Urbanism as Biopolitics (Seidosha, 2013), Metabolism Nexus (Ohmsha, 2011), Shiso toshite no Nihon kindai kenchiku (Modern Japanese Architecture as Intellectual History) (Iwanami, 2005). His translated texts have been published in many journals in the US. and Europe. He is now working on the Constructivism of Soviet Russia, as found in politics, economy, art and urbanism.
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