Shifting Perspectives on Media and Materials in Early Modern Japan

Shifting Perspectives on Media and Materials in Early Modern Japan International Symposium Saturday 4 July to Sunday 5 July 2015 Speaker Biographies (in alphabetical order) Keynote Speakers Peter Kornicki (Cambridge University) Yutaka Yabuta (Kansai University) Presenters Kenichiro Aratake (Tohoku University, Sendai) Claire Akiko Brisset (Paris Diderot University) Maki Fukuoka (University of Leeds) Radu Leca (SOAS, University of London Ewa Machotka (Leiden University) Morihiro Satow (Kyoto Seika University) Niels van Steenpaal (Kyoto University) Hiroyuki Suzuki (Tokyo Gakugei University) Hans Bjarne Thomsen (University of Zurich) Junko Yamana (Kawamura Gakuen Women’s University, Tokyo) Fuyuhiko Yokota (Kyoto University) Keynote Speakers Peter Kornicki is Emeritus Professor of Japanese Studies at Cambridge University and Professorial Research Associate at the Japan Research Centre, SOAS, University of London. His research focuses on how ideas and literature circulated, how books were read and what factors determined their reception. He has published numerous catalogues of the large collection of early Japanese books at Cambridge University Library and of various other collections in Manchester, Lille and Moscow. His seminal work The book in Japan: a cultural history from the beginnings to the nineteenth century has made a major contribution to the study of the history of the book in Japan. His current research interests focus on the adaptation of Chinese texts for Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean readers in the 17th-19th centuries. He is currently writing on the abandonment of movable-type printing in Japan, on Hayashi Razan's interest in translation and on a Japanese medical manual in the early 17th century. He has spent a total of six years in Japan, mostly in Kyoto. He was awarded the Japan Foundation Special Prize (with Hayashi Nozomu in 1992), elected a fellow of The British Academy (2002), elected a member of the Academia Europea (2012) and has been awarded the Yamagata Bantô prize (2013). In 2010 he became managing editor of the new journal East Asian Publishing and Society, which is now in its fifth year of publication. Yutaka Yabuta is Emeritus Professor of Japanese History at Kansai University, Osaka. He is also Director of Hyogo Prefectural History Museum in Himeji City, Japan. His research focuses on the social and regional history of early modern Japan. Under the leadership of the late Professor Oba Osamu, he researched Chinese ships that had drifted to Nagasaki and Chinese residences in Nagasaki in the early modern period. He has made major contributions to gender perspectives on the study of the history of women in Tokugawa, Japan. His English-language publications include Rediscovering women in Tokugawa Japan (2000) and “Nishitani Saku and Her Mother: Writing in the Lives of Edo Period Women” in The Female as Subject: Reading and Writing in Early Modern Japan (2010). He has been a seminal force in the promotion of international exchange to advance the field of Japanese Studies and his monograph Nihon Kinseishi no Kanōsei (2005) explored the possibilities and directions of studying early modern Japan. He continues to be engaged in the educational and research activities of the Kansai University Institute for Cultural Interaction Studies (ICIS). Page 2 of 5 Shifting Perspectives on Media and Materials in Early Modern Japan July 2015 Presenters (in alphabetical order) Kenichiro Aratake is Associate Professor at the Center for Northeast Asian Studies at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. He received his Ph.D from Kansai University in 2004. His recently published monograph Shinyō o meguru kinsei shakai: Osaka chiiki no nōson to toshi (Seibundo, 2015) explores the social and economic impact of the commercial circulation of night soil with a particular focus on interactions between urban and rural society in the region around Osaka. His research combines social and economic perspectives on urban history, the development of trade routes and market economies in late early modern and modern Japan. Since 2013 he has given a range of international kuzushiji manuscript-reading workshops at Heidelberg University (2013), Berlin Free University (2015) and the University of Chicago (2014/15). Claire-Akiko Brisset is Associate Professor of Japanese Cultural History at Paris Diderot University, and a member of the Centre de Recherche sur les Civilisations de l’Asie Orientale (Paris). Her research focuses mainly on relationship between text and image, visual culture (from painting to cinema), as well as textual production in classical and medieval Japan. She is the author of À la croisée du texte et de l’image : paysages cryptiques et poèmes cachés (ashide) dans le Japon classique et médiéval (2009), as well as the co-editor of numerous books dealing with Japanese epic, visual and written culture. Recently she co-directed a long-lasting research program on a 17th manuscript kept in the National Library of France, the Shuhanron emaki (The Illustrated Scroll of the Sake and Rice Debate). Maki Fukuoka is Lecturer at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on visual culture of nineteenth and twentieth century Japan. Her work explores a history of seeing through textual and visual resources. Her publications include The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in Nineteenth-century Japan (Stanford University Press, 2012), ‘Handle with Care: Shaping the Official Image of the Emperor in Early Meiji Japan,’ Ars Orientalis vol. 43 (December 2013), and ‘Selling Portrait Photographs: Early Photographic Business in Asakusa, Japan,’ History of Photography vol. 35, issue 4. Radu Leca has completed a BA in Japanese Literature in Kanazawa University before coming to SOAS for an MA and PhD in History of Art, the latter titled The Backward Glance: Concepts of 'Outside' and 'Other' in the Japanese Spatial Imaginary of the Seventeenth Century. Radu’s article on Brazilian Cannibals in 16th century Europe and 17th century Japan has recently been published in Comparative Critical Studies. Radu will soon commence a postdoctoral fellowship at the Sainsbury Institute for Japanese Arts and Cultures in Norwich, where he will research a Page 3 of 5 Shifting Perspectives on Media and Materials in Early Modern Japan July 2015 rich collection of premodern Japanese maps. Ewa Machotka is Lecturer in the Art and Visual Culture of Japan at Leiden University. She holds a PhD in Japanese History of Art from Gakushūin University in Tokyo and she used to work as a museum curator in Kraków and Stockholm. She is interested in interdisciplinary approaches that intersect visual arts and social and intellectual history, focusing especially on the multifaceted relationships between text and image. Her research interests include early modern and modern Japan as well as the role of visuality in collective representation, gender and nationalism. Her current research projects pertain to socially engaged artistic practices and the relationships between visual representation of nature and environmental consciousness in contemporary Japan. In 2009 she published a monograph Hokusai`s Hyakunin Isshu: Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity (Peter Lang P.I.E.). Currently she is co-editing (with Katarzyna Cwiertka) Consuming Post-Bubble Japan: Commodity, Garbage, Art (Amsterdam University Press). She is also Convenor of the Visual Arts Section of The European Association for Japanese Studies (EAJS). Morihiro Satow holds a PhD in Art Theory from Doshisha University in Kyoto and is Dean and Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the Faculty of Design at Kyoto Seika University. His research interests are topography and the landscape of modern Japan as well as popular and vernacular object-images. His book entitled Topography and Japanese Modernity: Edo Doroe, Yokohama Photography and Art Photography (Topogurafi no Nihon Kindai: Edo Doroe Yokohama Shashin Geijutsu Shashin) appeared in Japanese in 2011 at Tokyo’s Seikyusha. Niels van Steenpaal studied and worked at Leiden University (M.A.), Kyoto University (Ph.D), and The University of Tokyo (PD), and is currently Hakubi Assistant Professor of Japanese History at Kyoto University. He is a cultural and intellectual historian with a primary research interest in “moral culture”, a term that he uses to describe the pathways, processes and media through which morality and material culture mutually influence each other. He also works as an editor for two web-projects: Dissertation Reviews and The New Japanese-Dutch Dictionary Project. His recent publications include: “’Hinoeuma engi’ kaidai, honkoku: kinsei ni okeru sein denpa no ichirei toshite,” Shomotsu, shuppan to shakai henyō (2013); “Kinsei chūki zaison ni okeru kōshi kenshō no shakaiteki kiban: yuisho to shite no kōshi,” Nihon kyōikushi kenkyū (2012). Page 4 of 5 Shifting Perspectives on Media and Materials in Early Modern Japan July 2015 Hiroyuki Suzuki is Professor of Japanese Art History at Tokyo Gakugei University. Previously, he worked as a researcher at the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties following his M.A. graduation in Art History at Tokyo University. His research interests span the history of art institutions, nineteenth century exhibition strategies, as well as art historiography and theories. His latest publications are Meisho Fūzoku-zu (Paintings of Famous Places), Nihon no Bijutsu 491, 2007, and Kōkoka tachi no 19 seiki: Bakumatsu

Load more