JAG Members

Executive Committee

  • William Marotti, Director, Associate Professor, History, UC Los Angeles
  • Noriko Aso, Associate Professor, History, UC Santa Cruz
  • Gregory P. Levine, Associate Professor, Art History, UC Berkeley
  • Margherita Long, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Riverside
  • Kate McDonald, Assistant Professor, History, UC Santa Barbara
  • Anne McKnight, Visiting Professor, East Asian Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature, UCLA
  • Bert Winther-Tamaki, Associate Professor, Art History & Visual Studies, UC Irvine
  • Miriam Wattles, Founder, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture, UC Santa Barbara

UC Davis

  • Kyu Kim, Associate Professor of History
  • Joseph Sorensen, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures

UC Berkeley

  • Junko Habu, Associate Professor of Anthropology (Archaeology)
  • Gregory P. Levine, Associate Professor of the History of Art
  • Daniel O’Neill, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures (Literature)
  • Miryam Sas, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature/ Film Studies
  • Alan Tansman, Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures (Literature)

Graduate Students:

  • Carl Gellert
  • Kristopher Kersey
  • Patrick Luhan
  • Paul Roquet is a Ph.D. Candidate working in Japanese literature, visual culture, and film studies. His current research focuses on the personal and public use of media as a technology of mood-regulation, from 1978 to the present.

UC Merced

  • ShiPu Wang, Assistant Professor of Soc. Sci, Humanities, and Arts (Art History)
  • Ken Yoshida, Assistant Professor in the Globlal Arts Studies Program

UC Santa Cruz

UC Santa Barbara

Graduate Students:

  • Julianne P. Gavino is a doctoral student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. Her research interests include Post-WWII American Art, Public Art and Public Spaces, and Asian American visual culture.
  • Kirsten Ziomek

UC Los Angeles

Graduate Students:

  • Tanya Barnett, Asian Languages and Cultures
  • Noriko Day is a graduate student in Asian Languages and Cultures. Her research interests lie in spatial representations of Hokkaido in modern Japanese literature and visual culture and how they have been affected by historical events.
  • Emi Foulk, History
  • Timothy Unverzagt Goddard, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, focuses on Japanese, Chinese, and Korean literature, thought, and Buddhism.
  • Alice T. Phan, MA student in the East Asian Studies IDP Program.
  • Kevin Richardson, History.
  • Gabriel Ritter, Department of Art History specializing in modern/contemporary Japanese Art. Research interests include global modernism, Japanese Surrealism, as well as nonsense, humor, and everyday life in contemporary Japan.
  • Ken Shima, ALC
  • Sarah Walsh, History

UC Riverside

  • John Kim, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature (German and Japanese)
  • Kelly Jeong , Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Korean
  • Margherita Long, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
  • Setsu Shigematsu, Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies
  • Annmaria Shimabuku, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature (Japanese)
  • James Tobias, Associate Professor of English.
  • Ayano Ginoza, Lecturer in Japanese film and literature (2011-2012).

Graduate Students:

  • Paul Cheng is a Ph.D candidate in English. His areas of study include Asian American literature and film and his dissertation will explore the phenomenon of a “Transpacific Action Cinema,” tracing the movements of capital, populations, ideas and culture across the Pacific Rim and its complex relationship with visual culture.
  • Anne Chang, MA candidate. Interests: in Chinese Literature and Japanese popular culture.
  • Birgit Geipel, Ph. D. Candidate in Comparative Literature. Interests: in German and Korean Literatures of participation and division, theories of migration, biopolitics, cosmopolitanism, East Asian Movement.
  • Jae Hyung Ahn, Ph.D. Candidate, English Department. Interests: American literature, Japanese literature.
  • Regina Yung Lee (ryung001@ucr.edu) works in English, French, Mandarin,
    Science Studies, and Feminist Theory.

UC Irvine

Graduate Students:

  • Ben Aaron, Visual Studies, researching the painter Kazuki Yazuo (1911-1974)
  • Michelle Cho
  • Hyonhui Choe is writing a dissertation on Korean literary criticism during the colonial period.
  • Kim Icreverci is is a graduate student in the Department of Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on Japanese body genre cinema with particular interests in erotics (after Audre Lorde), affect, and the politics and experience of spectatorship.
  • Christina Spiker, Visual Studies. Christina Spiker's current work focuses on Meiji-period photography.

UC San Diego

Graduate Students:

University of Southern California

Graduate Students:

  • Carolyn Lee, East Asian Studies
  • Kathryn Page-Lippsmeyer, East Asian Languages and Cultures
  • Annie Manion, Critical Studies

Board of Advisors

  • John Clark, Australian Research Council, Director, Austalian Centre for Asian Art and Archaeology
  • Christine Guth, Victoria & Albert Museum, London
  • Michio Hayashi, Professor, Sophia University
  • Shigemi Inaga, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto
  • J Thomas Rimer, Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh
  • Toshio Watanabe, Director, Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN), University of the Arts London

JAG Alumni:

  • Jane Correia, UCR (Comparative Literature), 2011. Her research interests include the socio-political situations in France and Japan in the second half of the 19th century as well as post WWII.
  • Rosemary Candelario, UCLA (World Arts and Cultures), with interests in the globalization of butoh and the choreography of Eiko and Koma.
  • Nobuko Anan, UCLA (Department of Theater and Performance Studies). She is working on contemporary Japanese women's performance from the perspectives of gender/sexuality studies and pop culture studies
  • Franz Prichard, UCLA (Asian Languages and Cultures), working on practices of critical urbanism and cultural politics. Dissertation: “Ruined Maps: The Urban Revolution in Japanese Fiction, Documentary, and Photography of the 1960s and 1970s,” 2011.
  • Yuka Kanno UCI received her Ph.D. from the Visual Studies Department. Her research interests include queer film criticism, feminist theory,discourses on the actress, and Japanese queer visual culture.
  • Noritaka Minami, UCI. Studio Art. Noritaka Minami is photographing and researching the current state of Metabolist monuments of the 1970s.
  • Jordan A. Yamaji Smith, UCLA (Comparative Literature). Research interests include contemporary Japanese literature in transnational context, cross-exoticism, translation/interpretation, Japanese comedy/humor, kimono, hip hop studies. Authors of special interest include Oe Kenzaburo, Kirino Natsuo, Suzuki Takayuki, and Takahashi Genichiro.
  • Namiko Kunimoto, UCB, received her Ph. D in modern and contemporary Japanese art history. Her dissertation focuses on Tanaka Atsuko and Shiraga Kazuo, both members of the Gutai Art Association.
  • Ken Yoshida, UCI (Visual Studies), completed his dissertation, "Between Matter and Ecology: Art in Postwar Japan and the Question of Totality (1954--1975)" in 2011.

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