SPEAKER BIOS
PANEL 1 | Political Messaging of Labor
Frank Mondelli, Stanford University
Frank Mondelli graduated Swarthmore College with High Honors and election to Phi Beta Kappa in June 2014 and embarked on a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Okinawa, Japan the following year. He is now a Japanese Literature PhD student in the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at Stanford University. Frank's academic interests focus primarily on Japanese media, political culture, disability studies, and anthropology. He is beginning work on a long-term project which explores the relationship between Japanese political ideologies, resistance movements, nationalism, broadcasting, and literature in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Shelby Oxenford, UC Berkeley
Shelby Oxenford is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley, focusing on postwar and contemporary Japan. Her dissertation, Making Meaning of Trauma: Responses to the Tōhoku Earthquake, examines how narratives are interrupted, generated, and reworked in the aftermath of disaster through literature, film, and new media. She is otherwise interested in the tension between the questions of what does it mean to have justice and what does it mean to have healing in the aftermath of traumatic experience, and is interested in comparisons of how these questions of history and trauma have been accounted for, or not, in contemporary Japan and Korea.
Jun Hee Lee, University of Chicago
Jun Hee Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. His dissertation, entitled “A Singing Voice for Our Times: the Utagoe Movement in Postwar Japan and Processes of History-Making” examines the history and the narrative-making process of the utagoe movement, the resulting narrative of which has depicted postwar Japan in terms of popular struggles for better livelihood and musical culture befitting “modern” Japan. Having conducted dissertation research in Japan in the last academic year, he is currently in the process of writing up his dissertation chapters. ace.
PANEL 2 | Dysfunctions of Labor
Ramsey Ismail, UC San Diego
Ramsey Ismail is a graduate student of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. His research examines the various ways pressure to conform to the increasingly under-rewarding demands of first-world capitalism in Japan inspire alternative forms of agency, sociality, and relationship building.
Felix Jawinski, Leipzig University
B.A. in Japan Studies and Political Science, M.A. in Japan Studies (2007-2014)
Undergraduate research fellow at Aichi Prefectural University/ Japan (08/2009-09/2010)
Visiting Researcher at the Ōhara Institute for Social Research at Hōsei University (06-08/2016) German Translator of Yakuza to Genpatsu: Fukushima Daiichi Sen’nyūki by Suzuki Tomohiko published in 2017
Member of the German research project “Text-Initiative Fukushima” (www.textinitiativefukushima.de)
Member and in charge for research on Germany within the international research project on nuclear labor hosted by the Hibaku Rōdō o kangaeru nettowāku (Solidarity Network for Irradiated Workers in Japan)
Gao Ming, National University of Singapore
Gao Ming graduated from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Korea and Nagoya University in Nagoya, Japan before joining the Ph.D. program at NUS. Prior to moving to Singapore, he has lived, studied and worked in China, Korea, and Japan for many years. Gao Ming's research interests include Empire-building of Japan, colonial studies of East Asia and Manchurian (Manchukuo) studies in particular coolies (Chinese migrant workers in Manchukuo), STDs and infectious diseases. Apart from that, he trained as a barista while living in Korea. His hobbies other than reading and traveling include theatergoing, movies, visiting bookstores and coffee shop exploration.
PANEL 3 | Representational Work and the Mediation of Labor
Justus Watt, UC Berkeley
Justus Watt is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the History Department at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on rural society and its transformation during the twentieth century. He is currently conducting research for his dissertation which will examine the role of agricultural cooperatives in this transformation and the broader reorientation of state-society relations between 1900 and 1961.
Hannah Airriess, UC Berkeley
Hannah Airriess is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film and Media at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation, Staging the Bright Life: White-Collar Cinema in Japan’s Era of High Economic Growth, focuses on the figure of the salaryman, or male white-collar worker, in postwar Japanese studio cinema. She situates these films within domestic and transnational mass cultural theorization of new models of work, examining how workplace comedies mediate shifting formulations of national identity, class, and gender in the era of high economic growth (1955-1972).
Drew Korschun, University of Colorado
I am a student in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, pursuing an M.A. in Japanese. Next academic year, I will begin writing my thesis on the literature of imperial Japan and its colonies such as Korea, Taiwan, and the South Pacific. I will aim to uncover ways in which depictions of so-called deviant sexual and gender identities function as metaphor in colonial literature so as to outline writers’ stances towards the relationship between colonizer and colonized and between colonized subjects themselves.
PANEL 4 | Labor's Production Beyond the Material
Thomas Gimbel, University of Chicago
As a Ph.D student at the University of Chicago, I primarily identify myself as an intellectual historian. My methodology and research interests, however, span a much wider range of both disciplines and sub-disciplines within history. My dissertation, “Philosophers among the Flowers: Intellectual history and constructed greenspaces in Meiji Japan” studies intellectual history through the history of work, environmental history, urban history, material culture, aesthetics, and the analytic philosophy of language. To connect these seemingly disparate fields, I ground my study with what I term constructed greenspaces, by which I refer to built urban “natural” environments.
Xiaoyi Yang, Bard Graduate Center
Xiaoyi Yang specializes in the history of East Asian decorative arts and material culture. Her main research areas are Chinese and Japanese ceramics, medieval and early modern Japanese tea culture, East-West commercial and cultural interaction. In particular, she works on the aesthetic and technological exchanges between Chinese, Japanese, and European consumers, merchants, and potters from the late sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries. Her research aims to shed new light on underrepresented East Asian kilns and their workers. Yang held an M.A. degree from Columbia University and has worked at the American Museum of Natural History, Bonhams, Japan Society, and Shanghai Museum.
Thiam Huat Kam, Rutgers University
Thiam Huat Kam is a PhD candidate in the Media Studies program at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information. He researches about capitalism, immaterial labor, and affects, through a focus on media fandom and consumption. His dissertation project examines the fans of manga, anime, and games in Japan, and the moments in which their activities articulate to corporate interests as well as constitute an alternative economy based on non-capitalist values. He is the co-editor of Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan: Historical Perspectives and New Horizons (Bloomsbury, 2015) and has published in the journals Japan Forum and Japanese Studies.
ROUNDTABLE: Labor in Medieval & Early Modern Japan
Brendan Morley, UC Berkeley
Ph.D. candidate in EALC.
Primary interests include Japanese poetry, poetics, and intellectual history; current research focuses on the poetry and philosophical work of Chugan Engetsu, a leading light in the early Gozan literary movement.
Kaitlin Forgash, UC Berkeley
Kaitlin Forgash is a third-year PhD student in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She has worked primarily in the area of mid-Heian court politics, including a project concerning aristocratic women and Amida worship. Her current project shows how personal daily courtier diaries (kanbun nikki) can illuminate larger political shifts in the mid-Heian royal court.
Joel Thielen, UC Berkeley
Joel Thielen is a second-year PhD student in the Department of the History of Art at UC Berkeley working on early modern Zen Buddhist visual cultures of Japan. He has particular interest in monochrome ink paintings called ‘Zenga,’ painted by Zen Buddhist monks, and is currently examining how this genre of painting is collected and displayed in North America. Key inquiries include: how figures such as Hakuin Ekaku conceptualized painting in relation to Buddhist teachings and communities; how these primarily religious works circulated from religious communities into the art market; and, how collectors in Japan and the West came to value these paintings in the modern period. By investigating these questions, he aims to deepen our understanding of the early modern interrelationship of the visual arts and religious practice and enrich study of the modern interest in Zenga in relationship to philosophy, aesthetics, nationalisms, and the visual transference of ideas among modern nations.
Shoufu Yin, UC Berkeley
Shoufu Yin is PhD student in history at the University of California, Berkeley. Specialized in middle-period China (ca.800--1400), he is interested in areas where political and institutional histories meet the literary, intellectual and cultural histories. Currently, he is working on a project that studies medieval bureaucratic documents as sources for political ideas in East Asian context.