Endowed in 1988, the Toyota Visiting Professorship is granted to scholars from Japan and countries other than Japan in alternating years. It provides a rotating chair for scholars and public figures to spend one to two semesters at U-M to engage in academic exchange and research. Toyota Visiting Professors present public lectures, offer graduate seminars, and conduct research on various Japan-related topics.
Toyota Visiting Professors
2022-23
Emma Cook - Hokkaido University, Anthropology
emmacoo@umich.edu
I am a social and medical anthropologist whose research currently focuses on feeling, affect and emotion in food allergy experiences in Japan and the United Kingdom. I am particularly interested in exploring how the individual and social intersect, interact, and are embodied, and how cultural conceptions of food, food sharing, health, illness, and the body affect experiences of food allergies. The research constitutes three interlinked areas of investigation: The first relates to individual and affective experiences of allergies. The second explores social experiences of food allergies and how people manage a variety of social arenas. The third explores interactions with institutions such as schools, workplaces, and with respective medical communities in relation to diagnoses, management, and treatment of food allergies.
Past publications include a monograph titled, Reconstructing Adult Masculinities: Part-Time Work in Contemporary Japan (2016), an edited volume with Allison Alexy titled Intimate Japan: Ethnographies of Closeness and Conflict (2018), and articles in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Asian Anthropology, and Social Science Japan Journal amongst others.
