Announcing the Recipients of JPP’s Spring 2026 Project Funding

Japan Past & Present is delighted to announce the recipients of our Spring 2026 Project Funding competition. During this cycle, we received compelling applications from researchers and educators around the world, including many that included scholars at different career stages and from a variety of regions, embodying the global vision for the field to which JPP is committed. We congratulate the teams that were selected:

Kyōgen: Japanese Classical Comedy Project

狂言─日本の古典コメディプロジェクト

  • Jonah Salz ジョナ・サルズ, Emeritus Professor, Ryukoku University (Team Coordinator)

  • Julie A. Iezzi ジュリー・イエッツィー, Professor, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

  • Laurence R. Kominz ローレンス・コーミンズ, Emeritus Professor, Portland State University

  • Jane Traynor ジェーン・トレーナー, Graduate Student, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

  • Tarō Yokoyama 横山太郎, Professor, Rikkyo University


Japanese Popular Culture in the 21st-Century India: Pathways of Dissemination, Cultural Intermediation, and Youth-based Reception

働く日本─現代日本の大衆文化とメディアにおける労働

  • Ananya Saha アナンヤ・サハ, Assistant Professor, Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra (Team Coordinator)

  • Arpita Paul アルピタ・ポール, Assistant Professor, Visva-Bharati University

  • Minhaj Ahmed Khan ミンハジ・アハマッド・カン, Assistant Professor, K.R. Mangalam University


Songs of Wandering (1925): A Bilingual Digital Edition of a Japanese American Poetry Anthology

「放浪の詩」(1925年): 在米新体詩集のバイリングアル・デジタル版

  • Kenji Liu 劉謙司, Program Manager, Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC) (Team Coordinator)

  • Andrew Way Leong アンドリュー・ウェイ・レオング, Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley

  • Christine Chan 陳クリスティーン, Digital Archivist, Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC)

  • Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda 黒田理沙, Scholar-Translator, Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC)

  • Kim McNelly キンバリー・マクネリー, Assistant Director, UCLA Center for Buddhist Studies

We are excited to work with these teams over the next several months to develop their projects and prepare them for publication on the JPP website, thus facilitating JPP’s mission to foster multilingual collaboration, communication, and scholarship, and disseminate their results to a global audience. Thank you to everyone who applied! Please be sure to subscribe to our news blog and follow us across social media (Twitter, Facebook, & Bluesky)  to receive information about our next Project Funding recruitment cycle.

Michael Emmerich
Director, Japan Past & Present
Director, The Yanai Initiative

Paula R. Curtis
Operations Leader, Japan Past & Present
Academic Administrator, Asian Languages & Cultures, UCLA

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