Team

Angelika Koch is Lecturer in Premodern Japanese History at Leiden University (Netherlands), specializing in the cultural history of early modern Japan. She obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge and is presently completing her first book project, which explores sexuality as a health and disease concept in the Edo period (1600-1868). Her most recent publications include a chapter on "Sex in Eighteenth-Century Edo" for the Cambridge World History of Sexualities (2024).

Masato Takenouchi is Associate Research Scholar in East Asian Studies at Yale University. His research evolves around the social and cultural history of early modern Japan with a special focus on urban society, rural communities, religious institutions, and the social status system. He completed his Ph.D. in Japanese history at the University of Tokyo. During his studies, he worked as a full-time archivist and researcher for the Iida City Institute of Historical Research in Nagano Prefecture.

Haruko Nakamura is the Librarian for Japanese Studies at Yale University Library. She oversees Japanese collection development and management, while providing specialized reference and research support and organizing events that promote the Japanese collection. Yale Library collection’s rich and diverse resources lend themselves to her multidisciplinary interests in subjects including Japanese book history, digital scholarship, and archival studies.

Eric Esteban is the PhD Candidate in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He works on premodern Japanese literature primarily from the late 12th to early 13th centuries. His approach is based in feminist theory, queer theory, and literary studies. His dissertation close-reads the poetry of court women poets writing during the period of intense literary activity sponsored by Retired Emperor Go-Toba and traces the discursive transformations of "women's poetry" as it was used in medieval poetics.

Aafke van Ewijk is a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellow based at Rikkyo University with expertise on the literature and visual culture of early modern and modern Japan. She has particular interest in the early modern popular imagination, and representations of history, heritage, and classics in publications for children. Her PhD thesis (Leiden University, 2022) brings to light the cultural, social, and political significance of children's literature and the surrounding discourse in Meiji and Taisho Japan.

Mary is a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her dissertation "Theorizing the Anthology: Waka Contexts and their Afterlives" combines Heian- and Kamakura-period poetry collections with Edo period album- and screen-based media collection practices to argue for understanding the anthology as a trans-medial method of preservation and engagement. Her research interests include literature, art history, bibliography, media studies, and museum studies.

Thomas Monaghan is a seventh-year PhD Candidate in History at Yale. His interests lie in the imperial and environmental histories of early modern East Asia. His thesis, entitled "Sugar Islands: Colonialism, Technology and Border Zones in Satsuma’s Maritime Empire, 1609-1878" traces the emergence of sugar plantations on islands between Japan and Ryukyu, the hiding of Japan’s first colony behind layers of façade truths, and how the experience of colonial governance shaped the thinking of modern Japan’s early leaders. He is passionate about exploring unread sources that illuminate aspects of early modern Japanese and Ryukyuan society.

Paula R. Curtis is a historian of medieval Japan. She is the Yanai Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow and a Lecturer with the Department of Asian Languages & Cultures at UCLA. Her current book project focuses on metal caster organizations from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries and their relationships with elite institutions. Dr. Curtis also engages in a variety of online projects that compile digital resources and data related to East Asian Studies (available open-access here).

Sachi Schmidt-Hori is Associate Professor in Japanese Literature at Dartmouth College. Her research centers on gender and sexuality in pre-1600 Japan. Her first monograph is Tales of Idolized Boys: Male-Male Love in Medieval Buddhist Narratives (UHP, 2021). She is also the editor, chief translator, and co-author of the bilingual essay collection, Nande Nihon kenkyū suruno?/Why Study Japan? (2023). Her current project concerns menoto ("wet nurses") and their erotic spirituality.

Honglan Huang is a Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Haverford College. Her PhD dissertation (Yale, 2023) focuses on books as sites for material encounter and embodied performance. She was also a participant artist in Chicago Puppet Lab and she has created and performed a number of puppetry pieces that explore mental processes such as reading, memory, and self-reflection.

Mary Anketell studied Japanese at the University of Sheffield in the late 1970s and after graduation obtained an MA in Japanese Literature at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo. After a twenty-five-year detour from the academic path, she specialized in classical Japanese literature for an MA in Japanese Studies at SOAS, University of London, in 2011. Since then she has been working as a Japanese language teacher and an editor of Japan-related academic material from her home in Kent.