Concept Development Team

Ryan Cook is a film historian with a focus on Japanese cinema. He earned his PhD from Yale in 2013 and has taught at Harvard (as a Reischauer Institute postdoc) and Emory. He is currently completing the Library and Information Science program at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa with an emphasis in Asian Studies librarianship. His solo translation of Shiguéhiko Hasumi’s celebrated Ozu study Kantoku Ozu Yasujirō is forthcoming from University of California Press in Spring of 2024 as Directed by Yasujirō Ozu.

Library Services Team 2024-2026
Kristen Luck is the librarian for the Okinawa Collection and Japan Resource Center at George Washington University. She holds a M.A. in Asian Studies from GW Elliott School of International Affairs and a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration and M.P.A. in Policy Evaluation and Analysis from Virginia Commonwealth University. She is responsible for collection development, research consultation and guidance, event and workshop planning, and cataloging. As a qualitative methodologist, she also provides guidance in coding and data analysis.  Her research focuses on gender and workplace discrimination in Japan as well as modern Okinawan topics.

Sarah Rebecca Schmid is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies of the University of Zurich and the lead curator of the project “Japanese Buddhist Art in European Collections” (JBAE). She received her doctorate in 2022 at the University of Zurich. Her research interests include the role of myth in Japanese culture and society. Most recently, she has been working on medieval narratives as an associate for the SNSF-project “Time and Emotion in Medieval Japanese Literature.”