Reischauer Institute Names Postdoctoral Fellows for 1999-00

September 23, 1999

SEARCH THE GAZETTE

HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

The Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese studies offers four postdoctoral fellowships in Japanese studies to recent Ph.D.’s of exceptional promise. The fellowships enable these scholars to turn their dissertations into publishable manuscripts, and first option for publication rests with the Harvard University Asia Center Publications Office for its Harvard East Asian Monographs series. The Fellows for 1999-2000 are:

Hiroshi Aoyagi received a B.A. in anthropology from Washington State University in 1988, an M.A. in anthropology from the University of Arizona in 1991, and his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of British Columbia in 1999. His research interests include symbolism, language and culture, socialization and social change, industrial organization, and ethnographic research methods. Although Japan is his principal geographic area of interest, his "academic appetite" exts to other parts of East and Southeast Asia as well as to native communities of North and Latin America. He conducted an interdisciplinary research project based in China between 1987 and 1991. As a doctoral student, Aoyagi conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Japanese entertainment industry between 1994 and 1996 in which he examined the role played by young celebrities in the construction of youth culture. Part of this study was developed into an article, "Idol Performances and the Formation of Asian Identities," to be included in the forthcoming Japanese Pop Culture, edited by Tim Craig (M.E. Sharpe). Another article, "Between the Innocence of the Past and the Innocence of the Future: Pop-Idol Performances and the Field of Ger Contestation," will appear in the forthcoming Joining the Past to the Future: Japan at the Millennium, edited by David Edgington (University of British Columbia Press). Aoyagi's dissertation is entitled "Islands of Eight Million Smiles: Pop-Idol Performances and the Field of Symbolic Production."

Christopher Hill received his B.A. in English from Stanford University in 1986, his M.A. in comparative literature from Columbia University in 1992, and his Ph.D. in Japanese and comparative literature from Columbia in 1999. Between his undergraduate and graduate studies he worked as an English teacher in Yamanashi prefecture, and as a reporter in northern New York state, New York City, and Tokyo. He conducted his doctoral research in Tokyo at Hosei University. Hill's research focuses on the cultural forms of modernity, with a particular interest in Japanese literary and historical narrative in the Meiji period. He also is interested in comparisons of Japan with other industrializing societies in the late-19th century. Hill’s dissertation is titled "National History and the World of Nations: Writing Japan, France, the United States, 1870-1900."

Kiyomi Kusumoto received a B.A. in English education and an M.A. in English linguistics from Yokohama National University. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1999. She is interested in issues in formal semantics and in the syntax-semantics interface. Her main area of interest is tense semantics, especially cross-linguistic differences in temporal interpretation in different constructions. Kusumoto is particularly interested in the Japanese and Slavic languages. Her thesis is entitled "Tense in Embedded Contexts."

Laura Ginsberg McGuinness received a B.A. in comparative area studies and art history from Duke University in 1992, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale University in 1998. Her research interests traverse several subfields in sociocultural anthropology – including ger, sport, globalization, and popular culture – but she is particularly interested in the institutional and ideological construction of beauty and the body in contemporary Japan. She spent the past year as an assistant professor at James Madison University teaching introductory courses in anthropology and upper-level classes on ger and the conventions of ethnographic writing in classic anthropological texts. Her dissertation is entitled: "Fitness and Femininity: Discipline and Display of the Female Body in Contemporary Japan."