Katherine Rupp

Kathy comes to the Council on East Asian Studies from Yale’s Office of Development, where she served as Senior Prospect Research Analyst. She worked closely with the international team to build their portfolio of donors, and also had considerable experience with principal and major gift level donors, as well as with corporations and foundations. Kathy was project administrator at Yale-NUS College, coordinated an inter-city exchange program between a Japanese and a German town, and spent ten years teaching and conducting research at Yale and Columbia. As a post-doc at Columbia’s Heyman Center for the Humanities, Kathy taught general survey courses on the history of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. As a post-doc and lecturer at Yale’s Council on East Asian Studies, Kathy’s courses were interdisciplinary in nature and emphasized the relationships between different parts of Asia in historical perspective.

Kathy received her undergraduate degree from Princeton in Japanese and German comparative literature and Princeton’s five-year program in East Asian Studies. Kathy lived in Japan for over three years as a college and graduate student, and particularly enjoyed one year at the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies, where she studied at Kyoto University and stayed with a Japanese family. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Chicago in anthropology, funded by a National Science Foundation fellowship. The Japanese Ministry of Education sponsored Kathy’s eighteen months of fieldwork in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Nara.

Kathy has received numerous research grants, written a book (Gift Giving in Japan: Cash, Connections, Cosmologies, published by Stanford University Press in 2003), had articles published in professional journals, and presented invited lectures in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.