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 2024-25 academic year are as follows:
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JOEL LITTLER (Modern Japanese History, University of Oxford, 2024)
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Dr. Joel Littler is a transnational cultural and intellectual historian of Modern Japan, focusing on the losing side of the 1877 Seinan Civil War (also known as the Satsuma Rebellion). Dr. Littler received his D.Phil. in History from the University of Oxford in June 2024. He has previously served as a Visiting Researcher at Kyushu University (2022-23) and as a Lecturer in Philosophy at Thammasat University and Mahidol University in Thailand (2018-20).
Dr. Littler’s doctoral dissertation, “Meiji Civil War Losers in Asia: Mapping Miyazaki Tōten’s Transnational Revolutionary Space,” finds that although the ‘civil war losers’ were excluded from mainstream politics, they were active in pursuing their own conceptions of modern progress and frequently attempted to realize their ideas in China, the Philippines, and Siam (Thailand). Using the life of Miyazaki Tōten (1871-1922), a popular intellectual, author, revolutionary activist, and naniwabushi balladeer, to explicate the role of the Seinan ‘civil war losers’ in modern Japan, his dissertation aims to shed light on the multiple imaginations of the future in Meiji Japan, which were central to the early twentieth-century Asian revolutions and part of popular culture and protest in the late Meiji period.
At the Reischauer Institute, Dr. Littler will be preparing a book manuscript based on his dissertation and continue researching how the ‘civil war losers’ engaged in transnational activity in Korea and Southeast Asia.
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ALEXANDER MURPHY (Media Studies, University of Chicago, 2022)
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Dr. Alexander Murphy specializes in modern and contemporary Japanese literature, performance, and media studies. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2022 and is currently an assistant professor of Japanese at Clark University.
His dissertation, “What the Ear Sees: Media, Performance, and the Politics of the Voice in Japan, 1918-1942,” addresses the cultural politics of voice and sound in interwar Japan at the crossroads of poetry, acoustics, and musical performance. Owing to the arrival of mass sound media in Japan at the height of the nation's imperial project, it argues that the human voice became a site where the social and colonial tensions of the era—race and linguistic difference, migration and displacement, and the limits of the public sphere—found articulation as matters of rhythm, tonality, and noise. Against these conditions, it shows how a transnational cast of poets, orators, singers, and acousticians worked to reshape the boundaries of the imperial body politic by channeling the affordances of sound media toward different possibilities of identification and belonging.
At the Reischauer Institute, Dr. Murphy will be preparing his dissertation for publication as a book manuscript. He will also continue research toward a second book project, which will embark from the work of Yoshimasu Gōzō to theorize the transpacific trajectories of poetry, performance, and experimental media art after 1970.
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JAMES SCANLON-CANEGATA (Premodern Japanese Literature, Yale University, 2024)
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Dr. James Scanlon-Canegata received his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 2024 and his M.A. in historical linguistics from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in 2014. Before joining the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies as a postdoctoral fellow, he served as a Lecturer for two years in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University, where he taught courses in premodern Japanese literature, Literary Japanese, linguistics, and early vernacular music and song.
His dissertation, titled “Reading Sonority: Heian Songbooks and the Japanese Poetic Tradition,” examines kayō “songs” and the role of vernacular songbooks (fuhon) in shaping the literary and cultural landscape of the Heian court. His research highlights how these collections of song lyrics served not only as musical references but that they were also read, circulated, and transmitted as vital textual sources in the composition of waka poetry and a variety of vernacular prose works, showing their dynamic role in vernacular literary production. By examining the complex interplay between performance, textual representations, and literary production, Dr. Scanlon-Canegata's work challenges conventional narratives that separate music and orality from literature in premodern Japan.
At the Reischauer Institute, Dr. Scanlon-Canegata will be revising his dissertation into a book manuscript, aiming to provide a comprehensive analysis of Heian songbooks and their impact on Japanese literary history. Additionally, he will be initiating a research project that investigates cultural exchanges between Japan and China through musical texts and performance traditions during the Heian period, shedding light on the broader transnational dynamics of performance and East Asian literary traditions.
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JONATHAN THUMAS (Japanese Religion, Harvard University, 2024)
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Dr. Jonathan Thumas earned his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, with a secondary field in Archaeology, from Harvard University in May 2024. A scholar of Japanese religions, he focuses his research on a combination of archaeological and archival materials to understand the relationship between Buddhism and local society in medieval Japan.
His dissertation, “Places Apart: Buddhist Reclusion in Medieval Japan,” evaluates the impact of reclusive monks (tonseisō) on medieval Japanese Buddhism, combining archival and archaeological evidence to analyze the relationship between recluses and local society. Dr. Thumas argues that reclusion was a social activity that involved interaction with people of all walks of life. To support this argument, each chapter examines a different place of reclusion – called bessho, or “separate places” – as sites for both reclusive and social practice. His research demonstrates how places of reclusion saw a negotiation of Buddhism with medieval social life, compelling a reinterpretation of the ways in which Buddhism became a religion for the medieval Japanese populace.
At the Reischauer Institute, Dr. Thumas will be preparing his dissertation for publication, as well as pursuing research on an eleventh-century wooden pagoda recently excavated from a medieval village in Nagano, used in the ritual feeding of hungry ghosts.