2022-2023 Visiting Faculty & Scholars
Visiting Professor in East Asian Studies
Reinier H. Hesselink teaches the history and culture of the Japanese islands from ancient to modern times at the University of Northern Iowa. His specialty is the cross-fertilization of Japanese sources with information derived from the writings of Europeans visiting the islands between the 16th and 19th centuries, allowing for a new and multi-dimensional description of Japan’s early modern past. He enjoys taking a written document, a painting, a map, or a household object like a screen to analyze and elucidate their contexts, geneses, as well as their contemporary and subsequent meanings. He taught two seminars on the history of the city of Nagasaki: in the fall of 2022 a seminar on The Beginnings of Nagasaki (1560-1640), and in the spring of 2023 a seminar on The Dutch in Japan (1600-1868).
Christine Marran specializes in the fields of environmental humanities, critical theory, and gender studies. She is Professor of Japanese Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Co-Convener of the Environmental Humanities Initiative at the University of Minnesota.
Through a new materialist approach, Marran’s work addresses how those in area studies can more deliberately contend with the more-than-human world in this age of rising seas. In her analysis of animal and plant life, archipelagoes and climate in narrative and moving images, Marran offers strategies for reading and interpreting more-than-human elements in the work of activist-writers and filmmakers in the Japanese archipelago. Selected works include Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic Age, “Planetarity” in boundary 2; “Literature Without Us,” in Ishimure Michiko’s Writing in Ecocritical Perspective: Between Sea and Sky; “Animal Stranger in a Tokyo Canal” in Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power and other works.
At Yale, Professor Marran continued her work in the environmental humanities. She dug into the new Noriaki Tsuchimoto Papers archive at Yale to expand her work on the prolific documentarian’s films, paying particular attention to the role of photography, seas, and toxins in his films; she completed an essay on the conservationist technology of trap cameras; and she continued her work on a longer project of translation and critique, “Fukushima Diaries.”
Visiting Fellow in East Asian Studies
Professor Xu Guoqi was born in China and taught both in Asia and the USA before joining the University of Hong Kong’s History Department. He writes and has published widely in both Chinese and English on various topics.
Professor Xu is a leading authority of international history of modern China. His peers in Society of Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS) recently honored him with the 2008 academic excellence award. His most recent book Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008, published by Harvard University Press in spring 2008, was chosen by International Society of Olympic Historians as the best book of 2008. The same book also received rave reviews from Washington Post, [London] Times, Irish Times, New York Review of Books, South China Morning Post, Toronto Star, Journal of Asian Studies, among many others. The Phoenix Television (Hong Kong) devoted two whole episodes of its book program to focus on this book, a rare treatment for any authors. His ideas and comments have been frequently sought by media such as Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Times, the South China Morning Post. His invited articles appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, and other places. Professor Xu’s research has attracted worldwide attention and his research profiles and interviews appeared in both the United States and China. Most recently two long interviews of him regarding his research on Chinese laborers in France during the First World War and the May Fourth Movement were published respectively in 2009 from China in China Archives’ February issue (中国档案) and the July issue of Xi Hu Zazhi (西湖杂志), a popular literary journal.
Associate Research Scholar in East Asian Studies
Qiong Chen (Shandong University)
Sumitomo Postdoctoral Associate in Japanese Studies
Anne Aronsson is an anthropologist of Japan and obtained her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from Yale University. She was a postdoctoral fellow with a Suslowa-Postdoc-Fellowship grant at the University of Zurich in Switzerland where she taught a seminar course “Global Processes in East Asia.” At Yale she continued her work on her postdoctoral project on elder care in Japan and the use of robotic care devices, with a focus on social robots and emerging emotional technologies as well as teach in the Department of Anthropology; “Anthropology of Japan: Continuity and Change” (fall 2022), “Cultures and Markets: Asia Connected in Time and Space” (spring 2022), and “Culture, History, Power, and Representation” (fall 2022). Anne has authored several publications, including “Social Robots in Elderly Care: The Turn Toward Machines in Contemporary Japan,” in the special issue “Relations, Entanglements, and Enmeshments of Humans and Things: A Materiality Perspective” in Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology; “Conceptualizing Robotic Agency: Social Robots in Elder Care in Contemporary Japan” and introductory chapter in the special issue “Finding Agency in Nonhumans” published in Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism; “Multispecies Entanglements in the Virosphere: Rethinking the Anthropocene in Light of the 2019 Coronavirus Outbreak,” co-authored with Fynn and published in The Anthropocene Review; and her monograph Career Women in Contemporary Japan: Pursuing Identities, Fashioning Lives published with Routledge Contemporary Japan Series.
Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies
Before joining Yale, Tian Li was a Korea Foundation-Korea Institute postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Harvard University, and a lecturer on Asian screen culture at Stanford University. She was also awarded the Yvette and William Kirby Centennial in Chinese studies by the American Council of Learned Societies. Her teaching has earned a Teaching Excellence award from the Office of Undergraduate Education, Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Irvine. She specializes in Korean and Chinese film, media, and cultural studies. Her articles appear in such journals as Telos, China Perspectives, and Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. Her current book project Screen-capitalism: Transnational Korean Screen Culture in Postsocialist China investigates the shifting paradigms of cultural dynamics within Korean and Chinese screen media, at their intersection with affect, aesthetic, gender, and ideology.