Team

Lee Butler is an independent scholar of the late medieval and early modern eras.  His publications include Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan, 1467-1680: Resilience and Renewal; "Patronage and the Building Arts in Tokugawa Japan"; "'Washing Off the Dust': Baths and Bathing in Late Medieval Japan."  A recently completed manuscript based on Tabihikitsuke is tentatively entitled Four Years in Izumi: Village Japan in the Early Sixteenth Century.

Nadia Kanagawa is a historian of premodern Japan. She is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor in Asian Languages & Cultures at UCLA. From 2018 to 2024, she was Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and History at Furman University in Greenville, SC. In her research she examines how classical Japanese rulers approached the incorporation, assimilation and configuration of immigrants and their descendants. She is particularly interested in comparative legal histories of East Asia, and in exploring how digital methods and tools can enrich our analyses of premodern sources.

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).

Joseph Bills is a MEXT-sponsored postgraduate researcher at Keiō University, having completed his masters degree in Japanese Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2022. His work focuses on popular literature from the late Edo period with a particular interest in parody, imitation and allegory in kibyōshi. He also has a strong passion for digital humanities and museum studies, and has recently concluded working on a collaborative project at the British Museum digitising their tsuba collection.

Cheryl Crowley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Russian & East Asian Languages & Cultures. She teaches courses on Japanese and East Asian literature and culture. Her main research interests are the literature and art of the early modern period in Japan (1603-1868), and most of her publications focus on haikai. Her book, Haikai Poet Yosa Buson and the Bashō Revival, was published by Brill in 2007. She is working on a book on women haikai poets.

Karen Gerhart is Professor Emerita of Japanese Art History at the University of Pittsburgh. She has published monographs and articles on Japan, including The Eyes of Power: Art and Early Tokugawa Authority (1999), The Material Culture of Death in Medieval Japan (2009), and is editor and contributor to Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan (2018). She is also an author of the forthcoming bi-lingual volume, Mugai Nyodai: The Woman Who Opened Zen Gates (2024). Gerhart is currently researching the lives of the wives of the Ashikaga shoguns.

Mac Gill is an independent scholar and freelance translator. Her area of research is The Tale of Genji, specifically using digital mapping as a form of literary analysis.

Alexander Kaplan-Reyes is an independent researcher of late medieval and early modern Japanese history who received his Ph.D. from Columbia University (2022). His first book manuscript project, based on his dissertation, explores the affective and intimate ties between warriors during the Warring States and early Edo periods. He is also interested in the influence of Western sexology on twentieth-century understandings of the history of Japanese male-male intimacy and sexuality.

Harvey Loh is an undergraduate student of University of California Davis. He is double majoring in Japanese and German and translating Tachibana Morikuni's Ehon tsūhōshi as his senior honors thesis. His hometown is in Alor Setar, Malaysia, and he speaks Hokkien (his mother tongue), English, Malay, Mandarin, and Cantonese. Due to Hokkien sharing lots of cognate Old Chinese and Middle Chinese pronunciations with Japanese, Harvey loves historical Japanese on'yomi in Kanbun and Classical Japanese.

Melissa McCormick is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Japanese Art and Culture at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the intersection of art, literature, and history. She is the author of Tosa Mitsunobu and the Small Scroll in Medieval Japan (2009), The Tale of Genji: A Visual Companion (2018), and the co-edited catalog The Tale of Genji: A Japanese Classic Illuminated (2019) based on the exhibition she co-curated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Recent interests include the waka poetics of the Buddhist nun, poet, and potter, Ōtagaki Rengetsu (1791-1875).

Maria Grazia Petrucci received her PhD from University of British Columbia. She specializes in Sino-Japanese history, focusing on 16th century Japanese piracy in Kyushu, trade relations between the Portuguese and Japanese Christians, and the conversion of daimyo. She is currently teaching East, Southeast Asian, and maritime history at a college in Vancouver. She has more recently started to delve into the study of classical Mongolian to conduct parallel research related to Inner Asian history.

Benjamin Jeremias Schmidt is a Graduate Student of Asian Studies at the University of Bonn. In his studies he focuses on the social- and cultural history of medieval and early modern Japan. The research he conducts for his MA thesis explores conflict resolution in rural communities in 17th century Japan taking the village Ōsone in Hitachi province as an example.

Arden Taylor is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh and Seattle native. His MA thesis concerned hegemonic masculinity as seen in the Tale of the Heike. His dissertation will explore the pluralistic expressions of masculinity in warrior noh plays based on the Heike, centering on the "divine chigo" theme represented in Atsumori's character. His other research interests include waka and Genji monogatari, as well as exploring queer identities through premodern literature.

Pier Carlo Tommasi is Assistant Professor of Japanese at Vassar College. He earned his Ph.D. from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and previously worked at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His research focuses on medieval literature, with a particular interest in samurai culture, manuscripts, and life-writing.

Danica Truscott received a PhD in Asian Languages and Cultures with a specialization in Premodern Japanese Literature from UCLA in 2022. She now holds the position of Lecturer on Classical Japanese (Bungo) and Kanbun at Harvard University. Her current book project focuses on the most prominent woman poet in the Man'yōshū, Lady Ōtomo no Sakanoue, and her pivotal role in the transmission of Nara-period (710-794) poetic culture.

Mirko Winckel completed his master’s degree in Japanese Studies at the University of Munich in 2023. In his master's thesis he focused on the spread, consumption and reception of incense, especially agarwood, in premodern Japan. Apart from incense, he holds strong interest for the history of monastic institutions in the Middle Ages, the history of Buddhism, and medieval travel diaries. He is an avid Numismatist.

Kikuko Yamashita specializes in historical linguistics, Japanese linguistics, and language pedagogy. Her research interests include pragmatics, communication strategies, discourse analysis, and language policies.