Marcos Centeno
ゼンテノ・マルコス
Associate Professor
Japanese documentary film, Transnationality, memory, minorities
Spanish, English, Japanese, Catalan
Valencia , Spain
Marcos Centeno is specialised in film and media and Japanese studies, particularly interested in documentary film, memory, transnationality, gender, militant cinema and the representation of minorities mainly the Ainu people, for which he uses contributions from visual anthropology and ethnographic studies. He is currently reserach associate at the Nissan Insitute for Japanese Studies, Univesity of Oxford. Previously, Centeno worked as lecturer for Birkbeck, University of London, where he acted as the BA Japanese Studies director. Before that he had been lecturer for the Department of Japan and Korea at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London where he coordinated the MA Global Cinemas and the Transcultural. Centeno has led projects funded by British, Japanese, North American and Spanish institutions. He is PI for TRAMEVIC: Transnational War-time Memories in East Asian Visual Culture funded by Generalitat Valenciana. He has received grants from international institutions to coordinats such as TRADIASIA (Transculturality and Diversity in East Asia), Tsuchimoto Noriaki's documentary school, with grant by the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University, Representations of the Ainu people in the UK, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Japanese Documentary Filmmaker Haneda Sumiko with colleagues from the UK and funded by institutions such as Sasakawa Foundation, the Japan Foundation, etc. and Japanese Transnational Cinema, funded by the Sasakawa and Daiwa foundations, Waseda University and Monbusho (Ministry of Education of Japan). After studying Ainu language and culture in Japan, his research on the visual representation of the Ainu people was awarded by the former Kokoro journal for Japanese Studies, and his full-length documentary, Ainu. Pathways to Memory (2014), directed after having worked as a television director, was translated into several languages and received several prize from international film festivals and other institutions (such as the National Museum of Anthropology, CSIC and the Government of the Basque Country). During his doctoral studies, he was a research fellow at the University of Valencia (2009-2013) and an associate researcher at the International Institute for Education and Research in Theater and Film Arts at Waseda University, Tokyo (2010-2013).
PhD, Communication, UV & Waseda, Valencia /Tokyo, 2015
- Lecturer in Japanese Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, 2017-2022
- Lecturer in Film Studies, SOAS, Univesrity of London, 2015-2018
Centeno, Marcos and Morita, Nori eds, Japan beyond its Borders: Transnational Approaches to Film and Media, Tokyo: Seibunsha, 2020https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40885/8/40885.pdf
Centeno, Marcos and Raine, Michael, eds., Special Issue "Developments in the Japanese Documentary Mode", Arts, 2021 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special_issues/de
Centeno, Marcos, González, Irene and Armendáriz, Alejandra (eds), The Japanese Documentary Cinema of Haneda Sumiko. Art, Gender, Society, and Culture. London, New York: Routledge (due to January 2025).
______. “Mothers-turned-activists in Japanese documentary film. Tokieda Toshie and the pioneer ‘democratic motherhood’. In Susan Flynn and Deirdre Flynn (eds.) Routledge Companion to Motherhood On Screen. London: Routledge, 2024
Chapter 12. The Ainu in Documentary Films: Promiscuous Iconography and the Absent Image”. In David Desser (ed.) Companion to Japanese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ : Wiley Blackwell, John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2022, pp. 271- 293 https://www.wiley.com/en-us/A+Companion+to+Japanese+Cinema-p-9781118955321
“1968 And Rural Japan as A Site of Struggle. Approaches to rural landscapes in the history of Japanese documentary film”, The Sixties. A Journal of History, Politics and Culture, 28 Nov 2021, vol. 14, issue2, pp. 151-168. https://doi.org/10.1080/17541328.2021.1996790
Los límites de la subjetividad en la vanguardia documental japonesa. El caso de Hōryūji (Susumu Hani, 1958) (The Limits of Fiction in the Japanese Avant-Garde Documentary. The Case of Hōryūji), Kokoro, no. 27, 2018, pp. 11-19 https://dialnet.unirioja.es/ejemplar/463800
'The Limits of Fiction: Politics and Absent Scenes in Susumu Hani’s Bad Boys (Furyōshōnen, 1960). A Film Re-reading through its Script'. Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, vol.10, 2018, pp 1-15. Indexed by Taylor and Francis Q1 and SPI Q1 (3/ 96). https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2018.1437659
The Fight for the Self-Representation: Ainu Imaginary, Ethnicity and Assimilation”, Alphaville. Journal of Film and Screen Media, issue 13, 2017, pp. 69-89. ISSN 2009-4078 https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.13.04
Las formas de la otredad: la representación del pueblo ainu en los travelogues de Benjamin Brodsky (1918-1919)”, Kokoro, Revista para la difusión de la cultura japonesa, nº 17, 2015, pp.14-22. https://dialnet.unirioja.es/ejemplar/463800
- Japanese Film Genres and Avant-garde, SOAS, University of London, 2015/2018
- Japanese Transnational Cinema, SOAS, University of London, 2015/2018
- Cinema, Nation and Transcultural Asia, SOAS, University of London, 2015/2018
- Theorising Japanese Cinema, Birkbeck, University of London, 2017/2022
- Advanced Seminar in Japanese Society and Culture, Birkbeck, University of London, 2017/2022
- Rethinking Japan, Birkbeck, University of London, 2017/2022
- Film Direction, University of Valencia, 2023/2025
- Japanese Cinema, University of Valencia, 2023/2025
- Japanese Diversity, University of Valencia, 2023/2025
- TRAMEVIC: Transnational War-time Memories in East Asian Visual Culture. Valencia Research Council Ref. CIGE/2023/066. Total €20,000, • 2024-2026
- Representing the Ainu in European Collections: Images, Artefacts and Texts in the UK. José Castillejo Grany Ref. CAS22/00276. Spanish Ministry of Universities. Total €19.430, • 2024
- TRADIASIA. Transculturality and Diversity in East Asia. Funded by Eurasia Foundation (from Asia). Total $63,000, • 2023- 2026
- iaki Tsuchimoto Research Grant Yale funded by Yale University Council on East Asian Studies, • 2022 – 2023
- panese Documentary Filmmaker Haneda Sumiko. Authorship and Gender Discourses. Funded by Sasakawa Foundation, The Japan Foundation,, • 2021- 2024
- apanese Transnational Cinema. Funded by Daiwa Foundation, Sasakawa Foundation, Birkbeck Research Committee Strategic Funds, Waseda- MEXT's Top Global University Project Fund. Total £20,645., • 2019-2021
- AEJE (Spanish Association of Japanese Studies), board member.
- Mirai. Japanese Studies Journal board member
- EAJS (European Association for Japanese Studies) Advisory Board Member. Visual Arts section coordinator.
- Watersprite: The Cambridge International Student Film Festival. Jury member
- External Examiner of Japanese Studies at Oxford Brookes University.
- Jury membre for the Prize of Best MA and PhD Thesis on East Asian Studies. AEEAO ( Asociación Española de Estudios de Asia Oriental)
- Jury member for ICAS/SEPHIS prize for books on Asian Studies written in Spanish and Portuguese. Awarded by ICAS (Convención Internacional de Investigadores sobre Asia) - SEPHIS (Programa de Investigación sobre la Historia del Desarrollo Sur-Sur) and sponsored by Casa Asia, Spain.