Michael Bourdaghs
Robert S. Ingersoll Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College, University of Chicago
Professor Michael Bourdaghs focuses on Japanese literature and cultural history, including Japanese popular music. He also explores the connection between literature and politics through the lens of critical theory.

Chelsea Foxwell
Associate Professor of Art History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College, University of Chicago
Chelsea Foxwell’s scholarship ranges from the medieval through modern periods of Japanese art with special emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the author of Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hōgai and the Search for Images (2015). In 2012 she co-curated the exhibition Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints with Anne Leonard at the Smart Museum of Art. Her work focuses on Japan’s artistic interactions with the rest of East Asia and beyond, nihonga and yōga (Japanese oil painting); “export art” and the world’s fairs; practices of image circulation, exhibition, and display; and the relationship between image-making and the kabuki theater.

Thomas Lamarre
Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College, University of Chicago
Thomas Lamarre teaches in the Departments of Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Much of his research centers on the history of media in Japan, ranging from the role of inscription technologies in ninth-century Japan (Uncovering Heian Japan, 2000) to silent cinema and the global imaginary (Shadows on the Screen, 2005), animation technologies (The Anime Machine, 2009) and contemporary infrastructure ecologies (The Anime Ecology, 2018). He has recently joined the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization, as his current research on nuclear ecologies has gravitated toward the intersection of media studies and environmental studies, building on his earlier training in cell biology, microbiology, and ocean sciences. His interest in this initiative on phytological critique — honing critical inquiry through a combination of scientific and philosophical engagement with plants across gradations of complexity — stems from a longstanding engagement with molecular approaches to ecology.

Hoyt Long
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Japanese Literature and Digital Studies, University of Chicago
Hoyt Long is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Japanese Literature and Digital Studies at the University of Chicago (Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations). His research and teaching interests range from literature, media, and book history to platform studies, cultural analytics, and generative AI. His most recent book, The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age (2021), offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. Since then, he has written articles that rethink literary translation in the wake of neural machine translation; that explore how platforms are reshaping global televisual attention and response; and that consider the possibilities of generative AI for cultural co-intelligence. He is currently collaborating on projects that include Niche Worlds: How Streaming Platforms Changed Attention and Reception and a set of studies that investigate the limits and affordances of large-language models as readers, writers, and instructors of literature.

Yu Miri
Yu Miri is a writer of plays, prose fiction, and essays, with over twenty books to her name. She received Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, and her bestselling memoir was made into a movie. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima, she began to visit the affected area, hosting a radio show to listen to survivors’ stories. She relocated to Fukushima in 2015 and has opened a bookstore and theatre space to continue her cultural work in collaboration with those affected by the disaster. In 2020, she received a National Book Award for her novel Tokyo Ueno Station.

Mee-Ju Ro
Assistant Professor of English, University of Chicago
Mee-Ju Ro's research focuses on Asian American literatures, more specifically transpacific women’s writings. She also works with Korean texts and their English translations. Both her research and teaching engage with women’s writing, race and gender studies, translation theory, performance, and frames that disarticulate national paradigms.

1. WBEZ-FM special report: “What Happened to Chicago’s Japanese American Neighborhoods” (2017)
2. Erik Matsunaga’s investigations into the history of Chicago’s Japanese American community
3. Takako Day’s articles on the history of Chicago’s Japanese American community
4. Ryan Yokota’s articles on the history of Chicago’s Japanese American community
5. Japanese American Service Committee’s Legacy Project oral histories from Chicago
6. Chicago Japanese American Historical Society
7. “Uprooted”: interactive multimedia experience about multigenerational effects of Japanese American incarceration— from the West Coast to Chicago
8. “Resettlement: Chicago Story”: Short film and website from Full Spectrum Film Productions

TBD

If you are interested in getting involved with the project, please contact Michael Bourdaghs at mbourdaghs@uchicago.edu with your name, contact information, and answers to the following questions:

1. What, if any, is your connection to Chicago’s Japanese American community?
2. Are you interested in being interviewed for this project?