The Reischauer Institute Postdoctoral Fellowships in Japanese Studies provide recent graduates with the opportunity to continue their doctoral research at Harvard and produce publishable work from their dissertations. The fellows participate in the Japanese studies community at Harvard, work with faculty and students, and present their research in the Japan Forum lecture series at some point during their stay.
The RIJS Postdoctoral Fellows for the 2026-27 academic year are as follows:
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NAOMI KUROMIYA (East Asian Art and Archaeology, University of Cambridge, 2025)
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Dr. Naomi Kuromiya specializes in the history of modern Japanese art and architecture. She earned her Ph.D. in East Asian Art History from Columbia University in 2025. Before joining the Reischauer Institute as a Postdoctoral Fellow, she worked as the Senior Research Associate for Japan Society in New York, where she was responsible for curatorial research and writing for gallery exhibitions.
Her dissertation, “The Collapse of Past and Present: Tracing ‘Integrated Art’ in Modern Japan,” examines an artistic phenomenon—“integrated art”—that began to crystallize in the 1920s and early 1930s. Characterized by several impulses toward totality, “integrated art” attempted to unify multiple artistic forms, merge art and its viewership, and most notably, collapse traditional Japanese arts (the “past”) with modernism (the “present”). Grounded in the analysis of case studies that range from ikebana installations to avant-garde theater, and paying particular attention to their photographic documentation, the dissertation argues that the pursuit of a holistic Japanese art practice was an attempt to resolve the fractured present. It re-examines the aesthetic and political stakes of traditional arts, modernism, and the concept of totality, shedding new light on artists working from the prewar through postwar periods.
At the Reischauer Institute, Dr. Kuromiya will prepare her dissertation for publication as a book manuscript. As an initial phase of her next project, she will also begin researching the presence and meaning of color in modern Japanese architecture and design.
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HANA LETHEN (Premodern Japanese Literature & Culture, Columbia University, 2026)
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Dr. Hana Lethen is a scholar of premodern Japanese literature and culture, specializing in the theater and performance of medieval Japan. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University in 2026.
Her dissertation, “Choreographies of Eccentricity: Madness, Dance, and Gender in Medieval Noh Theater,” examines noh plays centered on mad figures—especially madwomen—that were first popularized in the Muromachi period (1336–1573). Such plays dramatize how madness in premodern Japan occurred not only within the confines of a mental interior but even more so on the plane of the moving body, with “madness” (kurui) often extending to denote the act of dance. By charting madness’s inseparability from the eccentric movements of the mad and their spectatorship, the dissertation reveals how madness in noh transforms and genders bodies, pronounces and essentializes difference, and ultimately elevates the marginalized medieval performer as a purveyor of high culture. Throughout, the project emphasizes the cultural contingency of madness and the gendered body, thereby illuminating noh’s aesthetic and institutional formation from out of the nexus of culture, politics, and society. Highlighting the potentials of performance as an embodied archive, Dr. Lethen’s research is informed by extensive training and performance experience in noh dance and chanting.
At the Reischauer Institute, Dr. Lethen will revise and expand her dissertation into a book manuscript. She will also begin research on her next project, which focuses on the early modern emergence of novel movement paradigms in dances now classified as nihon buyō.
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YUEYING LI (Premodern Japanese Literature, University of California, Los Angeles, 2026)
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Yueying Li is a scholar of premodern Japanese literature, with research interests in The Tale of Genji, narrative theory, media, and authorship. She received her Ph.D. in Japanese Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Her dissertation, “The Making and Unmaking of The Tale of Genji,” rereads Genji as a metafictional monogatari: a tale concerned with the social processes through which stories are produced, transmitted, and contested. Focusing on the circulation of information, the construction of authorship, and the shifting possibilities of narrative agency, her work examines how persons and events become narratable within the court society of Genji, and how the tale ultimately reveals the limits of its own narrative forms.
At the Reischauer Institute, Dr. Li will revise her dissertation into a book manuscript.
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REYHAN SILINGAR (Modern Japanese History, University of Cambridge, 2026)
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Dr. Reyhan Silingar is a historian of modern Japan specialising in political, diplomatic, and international history, with a particular focus on monarchy, empire, war, and the international order. She earned her Ph.D. in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Cambridge in 2026, where she was a member of Trinity College. Since 2024, she has taught Japanese history as a lecturer at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po).
Dr. Silingar’s dissertation, “Mobilising Monarchy: Emperor Hirohito and Japan’s Imperial House Diplomacy, 1921-1975,” examines how the Japanese imperial institution was used as a flexible instrument of diplomacy and statecraft across the remaking of the international order. The project follows Emperor Hirohito’s overseas engagements, from his 1921 European tour as crown prince to his postwar visits to Europe and the United States. By treating these encounters as international political events rather than ceremonial episodes, it traces the imperial house’s role in Japanese foreign policy, from interwar status politics and wartime imperial state building to postwar reconciliation, international reintegration, and Cold War alliance management.
At the Reischauer Institute, Dr. Silingar will revise her dissertation into a book manuscript. She will also continue work on her next project, “How Wars End: Japan’s Endgame as Global History,” which examines Japan’s transition from defeat to settlement as part of a wider global history of war termination, legitimacy, and postwar order.
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CHRISTOPHER TAYLOR (Comparative Thought and Literature, Johns Hopkins University, 2024)
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Dr. Christopher Taylor earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Thought and Literature from Johns Hopkins University in 2024. He completed his dissertation research as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science visiting research fellow at the University of Tokyo (2021–2022). Before joining the Reischauer Institute as a Postdoctoral Fellow, he taught courses on Japanese media history, global animation and special effects film history, and histories and theories of translation at Johns Hopkins University. He currently serves as the co-chair of the Animated Media Scholarly Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
His dissertation, “Artificial Life in the Transwar Japanese Imagination,” traces the transwar history and contemporary afterlives of Japanese modernists’ engagements with—and proposed alternatives to—the visions of nature, human nature, and technological modernity expressed in Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots, 1920) and embodied in the figure of the robotic artificial human. Principally, it contends that artificial humans (jinzō ningen)—from interwar automata like Nishimura Makoto’s Gakutensoku to Ishiguro Hiroshi’s Geminoid series and Alternative Machine’s android Alter3—should be understood not simply as technical objects but as new media. Specifically, the project analyzes how Japanese scientists, artists, writers, and critics since the 1920s have conceptualized, experienced, and exploited artificial humans’ dual function as both technical, animated media and affective, animating media: the same artificial humans that “moved” through the mechanisms of electricity, air pressure, film projection, or nuclear energy were also “moving” audiences cognitively and affectively, whether by revivifying shared pasts (actual or invented), bringing to life present hopes and fears, or mobilizing a sense of wonder at the promise of a preferred future.
At the Reischauer Institute, Dr. Taylor will work on revising and expanding his dissertation for publication as a monograph.