The Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies sponsors ongoing study groups to support the research of Harvard faculty and graduate students. These study groups bring together members of the Harvard scholarly community, including faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, visiting scholars, and, in many cases, leading scholars from area institutions, to explore specific research themes that relate in some way to Japan.
Japan Ethnography Reading Group (JERG)
Since 2021, the Japan Ethnography Reading Group (JERG) has gathered postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and scholars to read and discuss current ethnographic monographs in the field of Japanese Studies. JERG deepens scholarly exchange and connections within the Reischauer Institute’s scholarly community while encouraging greater engagement with the theories, research questions, methodological approaches and fieldwork that animate anthropology, sociology, and the qualitative social sciences more broadly. See below for a list of readings covered by JERG, a number of which were published by past RIJS postdoctoral fellows. For more information about JERG, please contact Dr. Gavin H. Whitelaw, Executive Director of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.
2020-21
Marie Abe (RIJS Postdoctoral Fellow 2008-09), Resonances of Chindonya (Wesleyan 2018)
Allison Alexy, Intimate Disconnections (Chicago 2020)
Aya Hirata Kimura, Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima (Hawaii 2016)
Chika Watanabe, Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar (Hawaii 2019)
Patrick W. Galbraith, Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan (Duke 2020)
2021-22
Adam Lyons (RIJS Postdoctoral Fellow 2017-18), Karma and Punishment: Prison Chaplaincy in Japan (Harvard 2021)
Gabriele Koch (RIJS Postdoctoral Fellow 2013-14), Healing Labor: Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy (Stanford 2021)
Nana Okura Gagné, Reworking Japan (Cornell 2020)
Suma Ikeuchi, Jesus Loves Japan: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora (Stanford 2019)
C. Anne Claus, Drawing the Sea Near: Satoumi and Reef Preservation in Okinawa (Minnesota 2020)
Shiho Satsuka, Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies (Duke 2015)
Gabriella Lukács, Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan’s Digital Economy (Duke 2020)
2022-23
Jennifer Prough, Kyoto Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Contemporary Japan (Hawaii 2023)
Ian Reader, Pilgrims Until We Die: Unending Pilgrimage in Shikoku (Oxford 2021)
Daniel White, Administering Affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the Politics of Anxiety (Stanford 2022)
Chris McMorran, Ryokan: Mobilizing Service (Hawaii 2022)
2023-24
Ryo Morimoto (RIJS Postdoctoral Fellow 2018-19), Nuclear Ghosts: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima's Gray Zone (UC Press 2023)
Jun Uchida, (Korean Institute/RIJS Joint Postdoctoral Fellowship 2008 - 2009) Provincializing Empire: Ōmi Merchants in the Japanese Transpacific Diaspora (UC Press 2023)
Heather Anne Swanson, Spawning Modern Fish: Transnational Comparison in the Making of Japanese Salmon (Washington 2022)
Susanne Klien, Urban Migrants in Rural Japan: Between Agency and Anomie in a Post-Growth Society (SUNY 2020)
Anne Allison, Being Dead Otherwise (Duke 2023)
2024-25
TBA