2012 - 2013 Postdoctoral Associates

Martin Bale is an anthropological archaeologist engaged in research on Northeast Asia. The majority of his research has been on the pre-history and proto-history of the Korean Peninsula in the period 3500 BC-300 AD. Bale received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, and his dissertation is about patterns of storage and social change in Mumun Period Korea (c. 1500-300 BC). Bale is interested in how and why the very earliest socio-politically complex groups formed and developed, particularly from the perspective of agriculture, settlements, and political economy. He was at the Early Korea Project in the Korea Institute, Harvard University as an Associate in Research and Early Korea Project Fellow from 2009 to 2011 and as the Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow from 2011 to 2012. Bale pursues an active program of fieldwork in Korea at sites in the Nam and Taehwa River basins. He taught “Approaches to Korean Archaeology” in the fall of 2012.

Akira Shimizu studies early modern Japanese history. His dissertation, “Eating Edo, Sensing Japan: Brand Foods and Market Culture in Late Tokugawa Japan, 1780-1868,” investigates the role played by specialty foods which, due to their symbolic meaning and place of production, added extra value to become much more than the object of consumption. Identifying the market as the arena in which merchants competed for the handling of specialty foods on a daily basis, his dissertation seeks a new approach to the end of early modern social order by focusing on the everyday life of commoners. As a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University, Shimizu reworked his dissertation into a book manuscript and implemented a second project examining the commoners’ role in presenting “Japan” to the world in the middle of the nineteenth century. In spring 2013, he taught a course on food histories in East Asia.

Naoki Yamamoto specializes in film, literature, and the visual arts of Japan and East Asia. His research interests include world cinema, avant-garde art movements, cultural exchanges between the West and the non-West, the history of film and literary theories, gender and postcolonial studies, and the enduring relevance of a cinematic metaphor in today’s mediascape. His dissertation, “Realities That Matter: The Development of Realist Film Theory and Practice, 1895-1945” (Yale, 2012) offers the first comprehensive study of both aesthetic and philosophical responses of Japanese intellectuals to cinema’s ability to alter the very notion of the real in the age of mechanical reproduction. Through a critical reconfiguration of Japan’s long but largely neglected participation in the global circulation of film and its major theories, it proposes an alternative narrative that no longer presents Japanese cinema as an ideal “Other” of Western classical filmmaking. During his term as a CEAS Postdoctoral Associate, Yamamoto will develop his dissertation into a book manuscript, as well as continue his research into film’s particular role in shaping the experience of modernity in non-Western contexts. With this in mind, he taught a seminar entitled “Tracking Contemporary Asian Cinema” in the 2013 Spring semester.