Current SEAA Board Members

Professor at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies of Waseda University in Tokyo, her main areas of research are gender, family, and work in contemporary Japan, and immigration policy under demographic decline. She has authored Staying on the Line: Blue-Collar Women in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 1994) as well as Japan’s Evolving Family: Voices from Young Urban Adults Navigating Change (East-West Center, 2016), and co-edited several volumes, including, with Mike Douglass, Japan and Global Migration (University of Hawaii Press, 2003), and, with Satsuki Kawano and Susan O. Long, eds., Capturing Contemporary Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014). Currently she is on sabbatical leave at the EHESS in Paris, where she is doing joint research with Hiroko Umegaki on work-life balance and well-being for families in France. She will be back in Tokyo in September 2018 after finishing her sabbatical at the University of Hawaii’s Center for Japanese Studies and the East-West Center.

Sonia Ryang is the T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Asian Studies in Rice University. Her research interests are clustered around the issues of ethnological study of cultural logic and fundamental principle of a society, interactions between humans and the environment (including non-human animals and food), scientific knowledge, and social justice. She is particularly interested in anthropological study of North Korea on the one hand and scientific collaboration across national borders traversing Asia and the US on the other.

Gordon Mathews is professor and chair of the Dept. of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  His most recent book is The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace, together with Linessa Lin Dan and Yang Yang (2017, Chicago: University of Chicago Press).  Other titles include What Makes Life Worth Living: How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds (1996), Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket (2000), Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation (2008, with Kit-wai Ma and Tai-lok Lui), and Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong (2011). He has co-edited books on consumption in Hong Kong, the Japanese generation gap, the pursuit of happiness globally, and economic globalization from below. Future projects include writing a book on life after death in Japan, China, and the United States.

Professor of Anthropology at the University of Guelph (Canada), Satsuki Kawano has conducted fieldwork-based projects in Japan focusing on ritual, personhood, childrearing, and disabilities. Major publications include Ritual Practice in Modern Japan (U. of Hawai’i Press), Nature’s Embrace: Japan’s Aging Urbanites and New Death Rites (U. of Hawai’i Press), and Capturing Contemporary Japan (with Glenda S. Roberts and Susan Orpett Long; U. of Hawai’i Press)xu. Currently she is exploring the politics of support provision for Japanese students with developmental disabilities. The research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada), the Social Science Research Council (US), the Japan Foundation, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Susan Brownell is Professor of Anthropology, University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is an expert on sports in China and has published multiple works about the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. She is also interested in world’s fairs and did research on the Shanghai World Expo 2010.  Her interests are in the body, gender, nationalism, transnationalism, and mega-events.

Liu Shao-hua is Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. Her research uses AIDS, drug use, leprosy, or environment issues as the vantage point to analyze the nature and trajectories of contemporary social change in China and Taiwan, as well as individuals’ life experiences and transformations within social change.

Ayako Takamori is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary and Applied Liberal Arts at Marylhurst University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research is driven by an enduring interest  in how belonging and identities are negotiated and mediated across borders and in post-conflict contexts. Areas of interest include comparative race and ethnicity, transnationalism and globalization, gender and sexuality, and media and visual cultures. She is currently completing her book manuscript, Traversing Borders: Japanese American Transpacific Positionings, about Japanese American ethnic formations in Japan.

John (Song Pae) Cho is an Assistant Professor in Global Studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. His publications include “The Wedding Banquet Revisited: ‘Contract Marriages’ Between Korean Gays and Lesbians” (2009). His research  interests include transnational LGBT studies, neoliberalism, and the Internet. He is currently completing his first book manuscript, The Luxury of Love: South Korean Gay Men, Internet, and the National Cybercloset, about LGBT community building in 21st century Seoul.

Gavin H. Whitelaw is a sociocultural anthropologist and Executive Director of Harvard University’s Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. His research focuses on issues of globalization, commerce, work, food, and consumer culture particularly in the context of contemporary Japan. Prior to coming to the Reischauer Institute, he was Senior Associate Professor of Anthropology and Japan Studies at International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo. His writings have appeared in journals including Anthropology of Work Review, Gastronomica and Contemporary Japan, and most recently in the edited volume, Capturing Contemporary Japan (Hawai’i 2014).

Nicholas Harkness is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. He specializes in the ethnographic study of communication and cultural semiosis. His research in South Korea has resulted in publications on various topics, including language, music, religion, kinship, liquor, and the city of Seoul. His book, Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea (University of California Press, 2014), was awarded the Edward Sapir Book Prize by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology (American Anthropological Association). A number of his papers have been devoted to developing an anthropological approach to “qualia.” These papers incorporate the innovations of contemporary semiotics into the ethnographic theorization of sensuous social life. Harkness is currently finishing a book about glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”).

Andrew Kipnis is professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research has explored a wide range of subjects, including social transformation, urbanization, education, subjectification, kinship, gender, ritual, gift exchange; economic, linguistic, political, social and cultural anthropology. Recent publications include 2017 “Governing the Souls of Chinese Modernity” (article with commentary), 2016 From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat (University of California Press), and 2011 Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics and Schooling in China (University of Chicago Press, winner of the Francis Hsu book award).

Jing Wang is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at Rice University. Her broad research interests are historical imagination, anthropology of state, urban development, social movement, ethnic community, documentary production, and modern Chinese art. Her dissertation project (July 2015 – July 2016) focuses on the Chinese state’s ongoing promotion of domestic multiculturalist policies through exploring the way it mobilizes cosmopolitan imaginaries of the “New Silk Road.”

Yukun Zeng is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Anthropology Department at University of Chicago. His research focuses on the revitalization of traditional Confucian education in contemporary China. The major research question for his dissertation project is how traditional Confucian literacy and educational practices re-articulate Chinese parents’ concern for their children and how these Confucian ways are adopted as (alternative) educational, religious, or other social space, given the sociopolitical situation and value landscape in contemporary China.