Professor Peter Kornicki FBA

University of Cambridge

president@bajs.org.uk

After several years teaching at the University of Tasmania and Kyoto University, I moved to Cambridge in 1985. I am now emeritus professor of Japanese and a fellow of Robinson College. For much of my career I have focused on the history of the book in Japan and East Asia, and am always happy to get my hands dirty examining old books. Most recently this has involved visits to the National Museum of Denmark where I am working with a Japanese colleague on a study and catalogue of the collection of books and coins made by William Bramsen in the 1870s; this is due to be published in 2023.  In recent years I have also become interested in the wartime Japanese courses conducted in Britain and the people who attended them. This led to the publication of Eavesdropping on the Emperor: interrogators and codebreakers in Britain’s war with Japan (Hurst & Co., 2021; https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/eavesdropping-on-the-emperor/), but since then many people have written to me with queries about their parents’ experiences or with further information and so I am continuing work in this area too. My most recent publication is Ecologies of Translation in East and South East Asia, which I edited with Li Guo and Patricia Sieber (Amsterdam University Press, 2022; https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463729550/ecologies-of-translation-in-east-and-south-east-asia-1600-1900).

I am also editor-in-chief of the journal East Asian Publishing and Society published by Brill (https://brill.com/view/journals/eaps/eaps-overview.xml) and we welcome submissions relating to Japan.

Dr Ruselle Meade
University of Cardiff

Ruselle Meade is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies in the School of Modern Languages at Cardiff University. Before taking up her current post, she was a lecturer in Japanese studies at the University of Manchester and then a JSPS postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tokyo. Her research focuses on the role of translation in the global circulation of modern scientific knowledge. She is particularly interested in how historical actors have used scientific translation as a means of socio-political mediation.

treasurer@bajs.org.uk

Dr Jennifer Coates
University of Sheffield

I am a Professor of Japanese Studies at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield. My books include Making Icons: Repetition and the Female Image in Japanese Cinema, 1945-1964 (Hong Kong University Press, 2016) and Film Viewing in Postwar Japan, 1945-1968: An Ethnographic Study (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), as well as co-edited volumes War Memory and East Asian Conflicts, 1930–1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023 with Buchheim, E.), Japanese Visual Media: Politicizing the Screen (Routledge, 2021 with Ben-Ari, E.) and The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2019 with Fraser, L., and Pendleton, M.).

I am an AHRC Innovation Scholar and recipient of the 2021 Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual and Performing Arts, and my wider research interests include Japanese and East Asian cinema, photography, gender studies, filmmaking, and ethnographic methods. Before joining the University of Sheffield in 2019, I studied, researched, and taught in many areas of the world: as an AHRC Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (2012), a Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian National University (2011), Assistant Professor at the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, Kyoto University (2014-2018), and Senior Lecturer in Japanese Arts, Cultures, and Heritage at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures at the University of East Anglia (2018-2019).

honsec@bajs.org.uk

Dr Sherzod Muminov and  Dr Ra Mason
University of East Anglia

Dr Fabio Gygi
SOAS, University of London

I am lecturer in anthropology with reference to Japan at SOAS, University of London. My subject areas are material culture and medical anthropology, with a particular interest in how getting rid of things is understood and facilitated in different cultural contexts. I have undertaken fieldwork on hoarding in Tokyo and Kyoto, and on rites of disposal for dolls all over Japan. I obtained my PhD from UCL and have been assistant professor in sociology at Doshisha University before joining SOAS in 2013. My most recent publications include “Things that Believe: Talismans, Amulets, Dolls, and How to Get Rid of Them,” in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies (2018), “Hôtes et Otages: Entasser des Objets chez soi dans le Japon Contemporain” (L’Homme, 2019) and “The Great Heisei Doll Massacre: Disposal and the Production of Ignorance in Contemporary Japan,” in Buddhism and Waste: The Excess, Discard and Afterlife of Buddhist Consumption, edited by Trine Brox and Elizabeth Williams-Oerberg (forthcoming).

Dr Chris Perkins

Dr Chris Perkins is Senior Lecturer in Japanese at the University of Edinburgh. After he completed a joint honours degree in Japanese Language and Contemporary Society with Education Studies at Oxford Brookes University in 2004, with one year spent at Kitakyushu University as an exchange student. He then worked as a teacher in Gifu before returning to complete an MSc in International Relations at Royal Holloway University of London in 2007, where he went on to complete a PhD. He joined the University of Edinburgh as a lecturer in January 2011. His work has appeared in journals including The European Journal of Social Theory, Global Society, Television and New Media, The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Asiatische Studien, and Japan Forum as well as in numerous edited collections. His first book on media and memory of the New Left in Japan, The United Red Army on Screen, was published in 2015, and his second book The Tokyo University Trial and the Struggle Against Order in Postwar Japan was published in 2024 (both with Palgrave). Chris is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Association.

Sam Bamkin, Director of the BAJS Japan Chapter

I am Assistant Professor at the University of Tokyo, currently researching the policymaking processes and the gap between education policy and practice in Japan. I have taught variously taught courses on Japanese society, comparative policymaking, comparative ethics, education for citizenship and sustainability, critical theory and ethnographic methods in policy studies. As Director of the Japan Chapter, I hope to facilitate exchange between junior and established scholars in Japan. This will include mini-conferences and workshops for developing research-in-progress.