Beginning in 2021-2022, the center welcomes Postdoctoral Fellows in Japanese Studies for appointments spanning the academic year. Postdoctoral Fellows teach two courses over the academic year and participate in center events and related activities at U-M. Their research can cover any historical period of Japan—including contemporary Japan—and involve any academic discipline in the humanities and social sciences.
Postdoctoral Fellows 2023-24
Maura Stephens-Chu
CJS Postdoctoral Fellow | mhsc@umich.edu
Maura Stephens-Chu has served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University in Oxford, OH. She received her PhD and MA in Anthropology from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. She specializes in medical and cultural anthropology, with an emphasis on embodied experiences of menstruation in contemporary Japan. Broadly, Maura’s multidisciplinary and intersectional research includes theoretical and methodological approaches from anthropology, Japanese studies, gender studies, history, and science and technology studies. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Tokyo, Japan, on young women’s perceptions, education, and personal experiences of menstruation and commercial menstrual products. Her historical analysis of Japanese menstrual taboos, “From Sacred to Secret: Tracing Changes in Views of Menstruation in Japan,” can be found in the open access journal, Silva Iaponicarum. Currently, Maura is researching the formation of both layperson and medical understandings of conditions that fall under the umbrella of menstrual “irregularity,” including endometriosis, amenorrhea, and severe dysmenorrhea.
Keisuke Yamada
CJS Postdoctoral Fellow | keisukey@umich.edu
Keisuke Yamada has served as a Japan Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asian Studies Center, University of Pittsburgh, PA. He received his PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of Pennsylvania, PA, and his MMus in historical musicology at Northwestern University, IL. He is the author of Supercell Featuring Hatsune Miku (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). His other peer-reviewed work has appeared in Asian Music, Ethnomusicology Forum, Japan Forum, Japanese Studies, Journal of Japanese Studies (forthcoming 2024), Technology and Culture, The Asia-Pacific Journal, and The Oxford Handbook of Economic Ethnomusicology, among others. His doctoral dissertation, “Ecologies of Instrumentality: The Politics and Practice of Sustainable Shamisen Making,” received the 2021 Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools Doctoral Dissertation Award in Arts & Humanities.
He has been completing a book manuscript entitled Ecologies of Sound: Noise, Music, and Silencing in Industrial Japan. The book offers a sound-centered analysis of the logic and interplay of global capitalism, militarism, and industrialization that have shaped the soundscapes and sound-politics of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japan. The book manuscript is currently under revision for Duke University Press.
