My primary field is Korean literature and culture from the mid-seventeenth through the nineteenth century, encompassing texts in Korean and in classical Chinese. My research interests include intersections of literature and performance of music and dance, the history of gender and sexuality, the comparative history of slavery, ritual studies, travel writings, and cultural exchanges in East Asia. I am currently working on my first book manuscript based upon my dissertation, “The Government Courtesan: Status, Gender, and Performance in Late Chosŏn Korea,” which examines the music and dance performance in state ritual and ceremony by government courtesans, female entertainers of hereditary base status. Before joining the department at UCLA, I taught Korean literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and Seoul National University.

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Shigehito Menjo joined the department of Asian Languages and Cultures in Fall 2018. His teaching and research interests stem from his fascination with pragmatic use of language, particularly as it regards prosody in a second/foreign language. In his teaching, he focuses on learners developing both pragmatic aspects of language as well as competence in fundamental components, such as a syntax and pronunciation. He also explores effective methods of shaping learners’ aural perceptual ability in a new language and the development of joke telling in a second language. As reflected in his teaching interests, his research interests include the acquisition of pragmatic prosody use in a second/foreign language by adult second/foreign language learners and the development of its competence and performance with or without explicit instruction. He also examines, using linguistic methods, humor in oral communication. He received B.A and M.A from the University of Oregon and Ph.D. from Texas A&M University-Commerce.

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Bio

Oona Paredes is a Southeast Asianist specializing in the ethnographic and archival study of the southern Philippines, in particular its indigenous non-Muslim minorities known collectively as the Lumad. To date she has worked primarily with the Higaunon Lumad of northern Mindanao, but also studies the experiences of comparable upland groups regionally and globally. At UCLA she will be teaching classes on Southeast Asia, Indigenous Peoples, and the Philippines.

Before joining UCLA in 2019, Oona was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, where she served as Faculty Convenor for the Religious Studies Minor program, and as the Philippines country study group coordinator for the Asia Research Institute. She was also previously a Strom Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto Department of History (2017), a Fellow of the American Association of University Women (2009-2010), and a Graduate Research Fellow of the U.S. National Science Foundation (1995-1999).

Education

Ph.D. and M.A., Anthropology, Arizona State University

International Diploma in Humanitarian Assistance, Fordham University

B.A., Anthropology with a Minor in History, University of Hawai`i at Manoa

A.A., Liberal Arts, Honolulu Community College

Research

Oona is an anthropologist and ethnohistorian by training, and her research interests lie in the cultural and historical intersections of religion, politics, and identity, especially the ways in which minority “tribal” communities interact with state power and popular culture. Her current field research project looks at traditions of political authority in the modern Philippine state among the Higaunon Lumad, and how this authority articulates with oral tradition (encompassing customary law and indigenous religion) to reflect acute internal concerns about identity, indigeneity, and cultural heritage preservation. Her earlier work was more historical in focus, documenting the extensive colonial contact between Iberian missionaries and the ancestors of today’s Lumad, and analyzing the cultural imprint of Western colonialism and Christianity on what are still widely regarded as “precolonial” Lumad traditions.

Recent Publications

2019    “The Business of Being Indigenous: Preserving Lumad ‘Tradition’ in the Modern Philippine Context,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 50(1): 86-106.

2018    “Indigenous Peoples: Between Rights Protection and Development Aggression.” Handbook of the Contemporary Philippines, eds. Mark Thompson and Eric Batalla (London: Routledge), pp. 341-351.

2017    “Projecting Order in the Pericolonial Philippines: An Anthropology of Catholicism beyond Catholics,” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 28(2): 225-241.

2017    “Imagining the Future of Lumads in Bangsamoro,” Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies 30(2)/31: 93-105.

2016    “Custom and Citizenship in the Philippine Uplands: The Challenges of Indigenous Leadership among the Higaunon Lumad.” In Citizenship and Democratization in Postcolonial Southeast Asia, eds. Henk Schulte Nordholt, Ward Berenschot, and Laurens Bakker (Leiden: Brill), pp. 157-179.

2016    “Rivers of Memory and Oceans of Difference in the Lumad World of Mindanao,” TRaNS: Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia 4(2): 329-349.

2015    “Indigenous vs. Native: Negotiating the Place of Lumads in a Bangsamoro Homeland,” Asian Ethnicity 16(2):166-185.

2013    A Mountain of Difference: The Lumad in Early Colonial Mindanao (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, Southeast Asia Program Publications).

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Sixiang Wang is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He teaches courses in Korea’s premodern history as well as the history of cultural and intellectual interactions in early modern East Asia. As a historian of Chosŏn Korea and early modern East Asia, his research interests also include comparative perspectives on early modern empire, the history of science and knowledge, and issues of language and writing in Korea’s cultural and political history. His current book project, “The Cultural Politics of Universal Empire: Knowledge and Diplomacy in Early Chosŏn Korea 1392–1592” reconstructs the cultural strategies the Korean court deployed in its interactions with the Ming. Its examination of poetry-writing, gift-giving, diplomatic ceremony, and historiography underscores the centrality of ritual and literary practices in producing diplomatic norms, political concepts, and ideals of sovereignty in the construction of a shared, regional interstate order.

Sixiang Wang received his PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures of Columbia University. He was also a Mellon Scholar of the Humanities at Stanford University and the Moon Family Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

For publications and current CV, see his website: http://www.chosonhistory.org/SixWang/

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Satoko Shimazaki’s areas of research include early modern Japanese theater and popular literature; the modern history of kabuki; gender representation on the kabuki stage; sound and visual media; and the interaction of performance, print, and text. Her first book, Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost (Columbia University Press, 2016), which was awarded the John Whitney Hall Book Prize and honorable mention for the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theater History, explored kabuki as a key player in the formation of an urban identity in early modern Japan, along with the modern textualization of the art as it was pressed into service as a guarantor of national identity. She is currently working on two book projects: Kabuki Actors, Print Technology, and the Theatrical Origins of Modern Media, which explores the continuities and ruptures that link early modern books and prints as conduits of bodily knowledge, voices, and sounds to the age of mechanical recording and moveable type; and Kabuki in Print: Sukeroku in Theatrical Ephemera, a pedagogical guide to the rich world of kabuki theater ephemera, including playbills, actor critiques, illustrated digests. She will be on research leave during 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 with the support of the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment of the Humanities.

Before moving to UCLA in 2019, Satoko Shimazaki was associate professor at the University of Southern California. She has also taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and currently has a joint appointment as associate professor at Waseda University in Tokyo.

Education

Columbia University Ph.D., Japanese Theater and Literature (2009)

Tokyo University Foreign Research Scholar (2005-2007)

Waseda University, Theater Museum, COE Special Research Student (2005-2006)

Columbia University M.A. Japanese Theater and Literature (2002)

Keio University, B.A. Law/ Political Science (1999)

Publications

books

Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost

(Columbia University Press, 2016).

Publishing the Stage: Print and Performance in Early Modern Japan, co-edited with Keller

Kimbrough (Boulder, Colorado: University of Colorado Center for Asian Studies,

2011).

Articles and book chapters

“Bunka no shoyūsha,” in Shinchō Vol. 115 no. 6 (June, 2018): 198-199.

“Fantastic Histories: The Battles of Coxinga and the Preservation of the Ming in Japan,” in

      Frontiers of Literary Studies in China Vol. 9 no. 1 (March, 2015).

“From the Beginnings of Kabuki to Nanboku and Mokuami,” in The Cambridge History of

      Japanese Literature, edited by Haruo Shirane, David Lurie, and Tomi Suzuki (Cambridge

University Press, 2015).

“The End of the ‘World’: Tsuruya Nanboku IV’s Female Ghosts and Late Tokugawa Kabuki,”

      Monumenta Nipponica 66, no. 2 (2011).

“Editors’ Introduction: Theater and Publishing in Early Modern Japan,” co-authored with Keller

Kimbrough, in Publishing the Stage: Print and Performance in Early Modern Japan

(Boulder, Colorado: University of Colorado Center for Asian Studies, 2011)

“The Ghost of Oiwa in Actor Prints: Confronting Disfigurement,” Impressions: The

      Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America 29 (2007-2008).

Encyclopedia Entries

“History of Japanese Ghosts,” Jeffrey. A. Weinstock, ed. An Encyclopedia of Literary and

      Cinematic Monsters (Ashgate Publishing, 2013)

Academic Translations

“Minshūka, insatsu, tekusuto no shakaigaku,” translation into Japanese of an essay by Jamie

Newhard, in Haruo Shirane, ed., Ekkyō suru Nihonbungaku kenkyu (Tokyo: Benseisha,

2009).

Book reviews

Review of Robert Tuck’s Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in

      Nineteenth-Century Japan, The Journal of Japanese Studies 45 no. 2 (Summer, 2019)

Review of Keller Kimbrough’s Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early

      Japanese Puppet Theater, Asian Ethnology 76-1 (2017): 190-196.

Review of G.G. Rowley’s An Imperial Concubine’s Tale: Scandal, Shipwreck, and Salvation in

      17^th Century Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), Japanese Language and

      Literature 47, no. 2 (October, 2013).

Review of Leith Morton’s The Alien Within: Representation of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century

      Japanese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), Japanese Language and

      Literature 1 no. 44 (April, 2010).

Review of Michael Dylan Foster’s Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the

      Culture of Yokai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), Monumenta Nipponica 64,

1. 2 (Autumn 2009).

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Nina Duthie received her Ph.D. in Chinese Literature and Cultural History from the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at Columbia University in spring 2015. She specializes in narrative literature from early medieval through medieval China (220–907 CE), with an emphasis on texts from the northern dynasties. She is currently revising her dissertation, titled “Origins, Ancestors, and Imperial Authority in Early Northern Wei Historiography,” for publication as a monograph. The project explores the representation of the Tuoba Xianbei rulers of the Northern Wei state (386–534 CE) through the sixth-century Wei shu (History of the Northern Wei), and incorporates issues of mythology, ritual, and Buddhist writing. In ALC, she teaches undergraduate courses in Premodern Chinese Narrative and Fiction, Classical Chinese, early Chinese philosophy, and the survey Chinese Civilization.

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Huijun Mai is a scholar of pre-modern Chinese literature and culture. As a specialist in Chinese literature of the middle period (broadly 220–1300) with a training in material culture and intellectual history, she takes interdisciplinary approaches to look at the intersections between literature, material and visual culture, and the history of knowledge and thought. In her research, she is particularly concerned with the issue of canonization — the relations between high/elite literature and writings that were frown upon as low-brow, literary conventions and innovations. She writes on topics ranging from the writing of the everyday, the senses, the poetics of space, to medieval sino-Japanese poetic and material cultural exchanges that occurred along with Buddhist monastic and commercial transactions during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries (also known as literature of the Five Mountains). Her current book project, tentatively titled “Thinking Things: The Material Turn in Song (960–1279) Literary Culture,” examines the rise of material culture in the literary discourse during the eleventh to thirteenth century and how that redefined the boundary of literature. Prior to joining the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA, she received her B.A. from Peking University (2012), and M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University (2020).

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Nina Duthie received her Ph.D. in Chinese Literature and Cultural History from the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at Columbia University in spring 2015. She specializes in narrative literature from early medieval through medieval China (220–907 CE), with an emphasis on texts from the northern dynasties. She is currently revising her dissertation, titled “Origins, Ancestors, and Imperial Authority in Early Northern Wei Historiography,” for publication as a monograph. The project explores the representation of the Tuoba Xianbei rulers of the Northern Wei state (386–534 CE) through the sixth-century Wei shu (History of the Northern Wei), and incorporates issues of mythology, ritual, and Buddhist writing. In ALC, she teaches undergraduate courses in Premodern Chinese Narrative and Fiction, Classical Chinese, early Chinese philosophy, and the survey Chinese Civilization.

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I am interested in the literary and public lives of Buddhist women who lived in what is now China between the 4^th and 6^th centuries. My research engages the question of whether or not Buddhist affiliation provided new social and educational opportunities for women in early medieval China, and, in turn, argues that women were influential in the early spread of the Buddhist tradition throughout East Asia. I am currently undertaking two major research projects in this area, each with its own series of publications. The first project examines the political lives of Buddhist women in the Northern Wei dynasty and puts forth the thesis that the Northern Wei offers the earliest known case study that we have for the confluence of women, Buddhism, and political power that is seen across East Asia in the medieval period. The second project examines the prominence of female-to-male sex transformation narratives in Mahāyāna Buddhist texts within the context of the gendered practice of the tradition in early medieval China.

At present, I am working on revisions to a book-length study of Northern Wei Empress Dowager Ling, entitled: Numinous Under Heaven: The Rise and Fall of a Female, Buddhist Regent in 6^th Century Luoyang. I hope to have it published in 2023 with an Open Access series.

I am also the co-Director of the Buddhist Bodies Collective. The aim of the project is to curate and publish new, Open Access, body-centered resources for the teaching of Buddhism at the introductory level and across the humanities more broadly. Follow us on Twitter: @bodiesbuddhist

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I specialize on the spread of Buddhism along the Silk Road during the first millennium CE, in what spans cultural areas of South, Central, and East Asia. A philologist by training, I work with texts in the main scriptural languages of Buddhism (Sanskrit, Pāli, Chinese, Tibetan), as well as the rarer Gāndhārī and Khotanese. My research features philological treatment of unpublished and undeciphered manuscript fragments from Central Asia, but constantly in dialogue with art history, archeology, and modern ethnography. I am interested in the role of Buddhism within society and political power, its interaction with other religious traditions, and the texture of local culture and daily life in the multicultural mosaic of the Silk Road. My recent publications focus on how the Iranian, Sinitic, and Indic traditions played a role in the development of Buddhism in the oasis kingdom of Khotan. Currently I am working on a book manuscript on the life and times of the 3^rd Century Gandhāran Buddhist author Kumāralāta and the crisis of the urban mercantile classes that supported Buddhism through its most dynamic phase in South Asia.

My course offerings at UCLA cover these areas and highlight the interconnection of the Asian continent through Buddhism in antiquity.

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Kenneth M. Shima is an visiting adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He teaches classes in modern Japanese culture, film, literature, media studies, and language. He received his PhD. from UCLA in Asian Languages in Culture in 2020. His dissertation, Laughing Masses: Comedy and Visual Media in Imperial Japan examines the critical significance of comedy and visuality in Meiji-era periodicals. Kenneth’s teaching and research interest include Japanese art and architecture history, contemporary Japanese pop culture, the culture of anime and manga, and the circulation of mass media across East Asia in the 19^th and early-20^th century. He is active as an educator and translator currently working on projects examining early Japanese animation and its interplay with comics of the time.

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Elizabeth Leicester is the inaugural Associate Director of the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities. She brings over ten years of experience in managing the growth and expansion of academic programs, public outreach, and international partnerships, having previously served as Executive Director of the UCLA Asia Pacific Center, Assistant Director of the UCLA Asia Institute, and Program Manager of the USC Project for Premodern Japan Studies. Elizabeth has a BA from Columbia University and an MA from Stanford in East Asian Studies, as well as a C. Phil. in Japanese History from UCLA. She has done research and translations on women and gender in early modern Japan and taught courses on East Asian history and culture. In her new position, Elizabeth will be returning to her academic training and interest in Japan. She looks forward to bringing her experience to expand scholarship and deepen appreciation of Japanese humanities to wider audiences globally.

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Junko Yamazaki joined the department in the fall of 2017. In her research and teaching, she explores questions of film and media aesthetics as part of larger historical transformations of the conditions of cultural production and exchange, modern technological media-making practices, and forms of sociality and subjectivity. An interdisciplinary scholar by training (a joint PhD in cinema & media studies and East Asian studies), she also strives to situate her study of cinema in the broader intellectual and aesthetic traditions and debates.

It was her interest in the relationship between cinema and modernity, film spectatorship and hermeneutic practices, and diegesis and film’s historicity that inspired her research on a popular form of period film known as jidaigeki. She is currently working on a book manuscript on jidaigeki’s relation to postwar Japan’s lived present. Her article on jidaigeki musical, “Calico-World in Pastel Colors: The Aesthetics of Gender in 1950s Toei Jidaigeki” will be published in A Companion to Japanese Cinema (David Desser Ed., Blackwell).

Her research interests also include other media and art forms. She participated in the inter-university workshops on the early postwar “politics and literature” debate in Japan, and her annotated translations of Ara Masato’s “Second Youth” (with William H. Bridges IV) and Hirano Ken’s “An Antithesis” have been published in The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism (Atsuko Ueda, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, & Hirokazu Toeda, 2017). She is also preparing an article on postwar avant-garde composers’ engagement with the film medium, and the ways in which the specific economic conditions and institutional setting and practices fostered a vibrant film music culture in 1950s and 1960s Japan.

She is committed to exploring and extending the role of film and other art forms in intellectual life beyond academia. In addition to organizing a conference and various workshops, she has also organized a wide range of public events and had the opportunity to collaborate with various local and international organizations, artists, curators, scholars, and filmmakers (e.g. “From Silence to Pandemonium: Art Theatre Guild and Japanese Underground Cinema, 1962-1974” in 2013; “Collective Documentary Filmmaking in East Asia: Legacies and Developments” in May 2015).

In ALC, she is looking forward to offering courses on various topics ranging from spectatorship in Japanese cinema, contemporary media theories in Japan, gender and sexuality in Japanese media and ‘action’ genres across media platforms and national boundaries.

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Michiko Kaneyasu is an associate professor of Japanese language and linguistics in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. At UCLA, she teaches Asian language pedagogy and Japanese linguistics. Before joining UCLA in 2023, she was a Japanese language instructor at the University of Colorado Boulder (2012-2017) and an assistant/associate professor of Japanese at Old Dominion University (2017-2023). Her research explores the dynamic and complex interrelationships between language, social interaction, cognitive processes, and contexts, in both spoken and written discourse. Her work also involves practical application of empirical research into Asian language learning and teaching.

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Sarfaraz A Farooque is a Lecturer in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He teaches language courses at elementary and intermediate levels.

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