Associate Professor, East Asian Studies
School of Humanities

Japanese literature, environmental humanities, feminist theory, eco-documentary

Academia.edu page with pdfs of published work, cv, & book outline

2019-2020. University of California President's Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities.
2000-2001. Post-Doctoral Fellow, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown University.
1994-1995. Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Grant, Tokyo University. Supervised by Komori Yoichi and Ueno Chizuko.

2003-2015. Assistant and Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, UC Riverside.
1997-2003. Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo.

My first book was _This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory and Freud_ (Stanford, 2009). The book argues that Tanizaki is drawing many of the same conclusions about subjectivity as his contemporary Freud, but drawing them much more critically. I use Irigaray’s critique of Freud to sketch Tanizaki’s parallel critique of the way the “perversions” we call masochism and fetishism are examples, not of subversion or critique, but of the impossibility of female subjectivity in modern capitalist life.

My current project is _Care, Kin, Crackup: Fukushima and the Intrusion of Gaia_. Reading novels and activist narratives, I draw a distinction between a literature of affirmation and a politics of critique to reclaim vitalist modes of engagement for environmental ethics. Chapters include:

Introduction // A Flow Connecting Everything
Chapter 1 // Freedom and the Radiation Brain Mother: Hayashi, Kimura, Kobayashi
Chapter 2 // Oe Kenzaburo: Activism of Affirmation, Literature of Resistance
Chapter 3 // On Being Worthy of the Event: Four Fukushima Stoics
Chapter 4 // Undercommons: Fukushima Documentary and Citizen Science
Conclusion // Embodied Intelligence and the Intrusion of Gaia

Books
• In process. _Care, Kin, Crackup: Fukushima and The Intrusion of Gaia_.
• 2009. _This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory and Freud_. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Articles & Book Chapters
• 2021. “COVID Cough and Fukushima Novels: On the Not-Bareness of Life in Environmental Humanities.” _Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature_ 18 no. 2 (March) 271-284.
• 2020. (In Japanese) “Make Kin Not Children! Riding the Maternal Line with Kimura Yusuke and Kobayashi Erika.” Translated by Toru Oda. _Toward a Global Perspective: Post 3/11 Literary Criticism_. Edited by Kimura Saeko and Anne Bayard-Sakai. Kyoto: Akashi Shoten, 385-424.
• 2020. “Humanism and the Hikari-Event: Reading Oe with Stengers in Catastrophic Times.” _positions asia critique_ 20 no. 2 (May) 421-445.
• 2019. “On Being Worthy of the Event: Four Fukushima Stoics.” _Postmodern Culture_ 30 no. 1 (September): https://muse.jhu.edu/article/753926
• 2018. “Japan’s 3.11 Nuclear Disaster and the State of Exception: Notes on Kamanaka’s Interview and Two Recent Films.” _Asia Pacific Journal Japan Focus_ 16:16 no. 3 (7 August). www://apjjf.org/2018/16/Long.html
• 2017. “Eco-politics and Affect Theory in Oe’s Post-Fukushima Activism: On Shame, Contempt, and Care.” _Ecocriticism in Japan_, Edited by Hisaaki Wake, Keijiro Suga and Masami Yuki. Rowman & Littlefield. 121-138.
• 2016. “What Kind of Science? Reading Irigaray with Stengers.” _Philosophy After Irigaray_. Edited by Mary Rawlinson and Sara McNamara. Albany: SUNY Press. 173-194.
• 2014. “Hagio Moto’s Nuclear Manga and the Promise of Eco-Feminist Desire.” _Mechademia 9: Origins_. Edited by Christopher Bolton and Frenchy Lunning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 3-23.
• 2009. “Two Ways to Play Fort-Da: With Tanizaki and Freud in Yoshino.” _Perversion in Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture_. Edited by Nina Cornyetz and J. Keith Vincent. New York: Routledge. 147-161.
• 2007. “Malice@Doll: Konaka, Specularization, and the Virtual Feminine.” _Mechademia 2: Networks of Desire_. Edited by Frenchy Lunning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 157-174.
• 2006. “Nakagami and the Denial of Lineage: On Maternity, Abjection, and the Japanese Outcast Class.” _differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies_ 17 no. 2 (Summer): 1-32.
• 2004. “Nakagami to ‘kindai bungaku no owari’ [Nakagami and the ‘end of modern literature’]”. Essay plus zadankai [published round-table] with Aoyama Shinji, Asada Akira, Karatani Kojin, Takazawa Shuji, Tsushima Yuko and Watanabe Naomi. _Waseda Bungaku_ 29.5 (November 2004) 22-53.
• 2002. “Feminist Film Theory: Osaka, Circa 1866.” _differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies_ 13 no. 3 (Fall): 24-63.
• 2002. “Tanizaki and the Enjoyment of Japanese Culturalism.” _positions east asia cultures critique_ 10 no. 2 (Fall): 431-469.

Book Reviews
• 2020. “Co-opted Disasters: Japan’s Rightward Shift and a Scholarship of Counter-Engagement.” Review of Aya Hirata Kimura, _Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima_ and Mark Mullins and Koichi Nakano, _Disasters and Social Crisis in Contemporary Japan: Political, Religious and Sociocultural Responses_. _Journal of Asian Studies_, 79 No. 2 (May 2020) 488-492.
• 2020. Nicholas Sternsdorff-Cisterna. _Food Safety after Fukushima: Scientific Citizenship and the Politics of Risk_. _Journal of Japanese Studies_ 46 no. 2 (August) 429-433.

2018-2021. Japan Foundation Institutional Project Support (IPS) Grant for “Sustainable Japan” at UC Irvine, $323K.

Association for Asian Studies (AAS)

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)

Association of Japanese Literary Studies (AJLS)

Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA)

Trans-Pacific Workshop (TPW) Southern California-Tokyo Annual Symposium

Gender and Criticism Workshop

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=6157

Last updated
04/28/2022