Graduate Students

Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
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Ana Iwataki is a writer, curator, and organizer from and based in Los Angeles. She is a PhD student in Comparative Media and Culture at the University of Southern California. Her research is grounded by her scholarly, political, and intimate commitments to the production and preservation of culture in diasporic and hyperlocal contexts. Her dissertation examines the cultural and spatial politics of 800 Traction, a former warehouse in the Arts District where artists, many of them Japanese American, lived and worked until their eviction in 2018. As a community organizer, she is embedded in a history of art and activism in Little Tokyo. She holds a BA in Art History from Pitzer College and MA in Curatorial Studies from the Sorbonne.

School of Religion
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Lisa Kochinski grew up overseas and has lived in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. She received her BA in Asian Studies in 2010 from the University of Hawaiʻi, and is currently completing her MA at Kyushu University. Her thesis explores the reasons for the transfer of the deity Hachiman from Usa Shrine to Tōdaiji in 749. Her main area of research is premodern Japanese religion, particularly the interaction between Buddhism and kami cults. Other research interests include mountain religions, pilgrimage, and material and visual culture. When she’s not studying, Lisa likes to hike, practice Tai Chi, and play the piano.

School of Religion
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Elinor Lindeman is a PhD student in the School of Religions. She graduated with a B.A. in Japanese and History from the Ohio State University in 2019 and graduated with a M.A. in International and Regional Studies with a focus in Japanese studies from the University of Michigan in 2021. Her research interests are in early medieval Japanese Buddhism and women’s studies; she is particularly interested in how women and their communities influenced the religious landscape both within and outside of established institutions.

Department of History
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Issay Matsumoto is a PhD student in the Department of History. His research examines the transpacific, empire, labor, capitalism, and modern U.S., Hawai’i, and Japan. He received his B.A. from Tufts University, majoring in History and American Studies with a minor in Asian American Studies. He was also a 2021 Critical Language Scholarship recipient for advanced Japanese at Okayama University.

Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
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Brooke McCallum was born in the Pacific Northwest and grew up between Washington state, Texas, and Utah. Having first encountered the ongoing discourse on military occupation and war memory in Okinawa as a high school exchange student, Brooke returned to the prefecture to conduct ethnographic research before graduating magna cum laude with a B.A. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 2016. As a doctoral student at USC, she is presently engaged in an exploration of traumatic memory and identity formation as represented in popular literature and post-war media.

Cinema and Media Studies, School of Cinematic Arts
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Wakae Nakane received her BA in Art History and MA in Cinema Studies from Nagoya University, Japan. She joined the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts as a PhD student in 2019. Her research focuses on Japanese feminist documentary, developing questions around feminist historiography and promoting previously marginalized woman filmmakers. She has been an active participant in Japan’s independent film scene, working at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival and a local art theater in her hometown of Nagoya. Her publications include “Constructing an Intimate Sphere Through Her Own Female Body: Naomi Kawase’s Documentary Films” in Female Authorship and the Documentary Image (eds. Boel Ulfsdotter and Anna Backman Rogers, 2018) and Eizogaku (in Japanese), and “Female Performers as Authors: Documentary Film Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 and the Women’s Liberation Movement” in JunCture (in Japanese).

Department of History
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Nie Lina received her B.A. in Chinese History and Japanese Studies at the University of Hong Kong and her A.M. in the Regional Studies East Asia program at Harvard University. Now she is studying the history of middle period China and medieval Japan. Her major research interests include world history, cultural history, and gender studies. 

Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
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Sayo Sakamoto is a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. She received her M.A. in Asian Languages and Literature from the University of Washington in 2018. Her research interests are in the cultural history of Japanese popular music, particularly, popular songs from the 1940s to 1970s. Currently, she is examining the representation of nostalgia in Japanese popular songs and its relationship with the socio-political contexts of the time. Other research interests include Japanese cinema and media studies, Japanese postwar counterculture, and gender and sexuality studies.

Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
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Kirsten Seuffert grew up in Central Pennsylvania and received her B.A. in English from the Scholars Program at the Pennsylvania State University. After a decade working in online media and academic publishing and three years of teaching in Japan, she changed course (thankfully) and received her M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. She is currently a PhD student and Provost Fellow in USC’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures focusing on postwar Japanese cinema and visual culture. Her research interests include avant-garde and pink cinema, theories of embodiment, gender and sexuality, and “resistance” widely defined. In her free time she enjoys travel and listening to very, very loud music.

Department of History
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Emily Warren received her B.A. and M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California after researching twelfth century epidemics and disease. Over the course of her undergraduate and graduate work, she studied at Meiji University, Nanzan University, and Himeji Dokkyo University. In 2014, she began working with the Mainichi Shimbun as an assistant correspondent covering international news, and in 2016, she returned to USC for her doctoral studies in premodern Japanese history. Her current research interest is the history of premodern Japanese food. In her spare time, she cooks and writes fantasy novels

USC Center for Japanese Religions and Culture Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminars on “Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach”
Dissertation Fellow, 2013-2014
Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
Ph.D. candidate
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Department of History
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Jillian Brandt grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. in History and East Asian Studies from Bryn Mawr College in 2010. After undergraduate, she attended the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies. She received her M.A. in East Asian Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Alberta in 2013. Jillian entered the Ph.D. program in the History department at USC in Fall 2013. Her research interests include gender and sexuality in the Nara and Heian periods, particularly the political agency of women and marriage politics within the Fujiwara clan.

Department of History
Ph.D. 2012
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Kristina Buhrman grew up in upstate New York, and has always been interested in how individuals comprehend and communicate about the world. In undergraduate studies, this led her to a B.A. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Cornell University. At USC, this has led her to research the histories of science, religion and the environment in Japan. Her dissertation “The Stars and the State: Astronomy, Astrology, and the Politics of Natural Knowledge in Early Medieval Japan” covers how the desire for reliable information about the world drove not only the development of an independent tradition of Onmyōdō in Heian-period Japan, but also ironically created doubt about the reliability of interpretations of the cosmos.

Current Affiliation:  Assistant Professor of Religion, Florida State University (Fall 2013 ~ present)

Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
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Originally from Ohio, Victoria Davis graduated Elon University in 2009 with a B.A. in Political Science and International Relations. Victoria pursued further research at Tohoku University on a 2009 Fulbright Fellows Grant, thereafter completing an M.Phil in International Relations from the University of St Andrews in 2012. Prior to joining the USC East Asian Languages and Cultures Ph.D program in the fall of 2016, Victoria spent several years working in the defense contracting industry in Washington, D.C. Her primary research interests include medieval Japanese literature (particularly setsuwa tales), visual culture, and the construction and reproduction of discourses of power.  

Current Affiliation: Graduate Student at UCLA (Fall 2019-present)  

Critical Studies, School of Cinematic Arts
Ph.D. 2014
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Mike Dillon was raised in Kumamoto, and later Tokyo, Japan.  He received his BA in East Asian Area Studies and Critical Studies at the School of Cinematic Arts, both at USC.  He continued with Critical Studies for his MA and Ph.D. studies.  He was a Japan Foundation fellow in 2011-2012 and spent a year conducting research in Tokyo.  His dissertation addresses how various entertainment genres, such as yakuza and espionage films, engage contemporary social and political issues in Japan, such as illegal immigration and national security.

Current Affiliation: Lecturer, California State University, Fullerton (Spring 2014 ~ present)

Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
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Jesse Drian was born and raised in Goshen, New York. He received a B.A. in East Asian Studies with high honors from Haverford College, and then continued his studies, receiving an M.A. in the Regional Studies: East Asia department at Harvard University. Jesse is interested in the intersections between Buddhism, literature, and material/visual culture in premodern Japan, particularly through the lens of ritual and performance. Jesse is also interested in issues related to representation, and the ways in which people connect themselves and others with Buddhist deities and sacred texts. His primary research interests are premodern Japanese Buddhism, literature, and material/visual culture.

Gesshin Greenwood received a BA from Wesleyan University. She spent five years studying Buddhism and training as a Zen nun in Japan. She is interested in feminism, women’s communities, the history of Soto Zen, and the codification of authority through lineage. She is publishing a book on Zen practice with Wisdom Publications called Bow First Ask Questions Later, to be released Spring 2018.

Current Affiliation: Lecturer, Institute of Buddhist Studies, Berkeley (from 2019)

Department of History
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Born in San Diego, and raised in St. Louis, Nadia Kanagawa graduated from Yale with a B.A. in History. She then received a Richard U. Light Fellowship and moved to Yokohama, Japan to study at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies for 10 months. After completing the IUC program, Nadia moved to Tokyo and worked at Google in Japan for three years before returning to the US and to academia in the fall of 2011. Her research interests include early state formation in Japan, immigration from the Korean peninsula to Japan in the 6th and 7th centuries, and archaeology.

Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of History and Asian Studies at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina (from 2018)

Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
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School of Religion
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Matthew Keller grew up in Kokomo, Indiana. He received a B.A. in History, with a minor in Asian Studies, from Hope College of Holland, Michigan in 2012. He then continued to Yale Divinity School where he received a M.A. of Asian Religions in 2014. Matthew then studied at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Studies in Yokohama during the 2014-2015 academic year. His research interests include premodern Japanese religion and literature, with particular interest in the depiction of religious beliefs in nikki and folklore literature

USC Center for Japanese Religions and Culture Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminars on “Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach”
Dissertation Fellow, 2013-2014

Department of Comparative Literature
Ph.D. 2014
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Ana Paulina Lee received her Ph.D. in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California in May 2014 and holds an MA from New York University in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures. Her research focuses primarily on the Chinese diaspora and coolie labor migrations to Brazil and Cuba during the 18th and 19th centuries and the influence of that presence on literary canons and in visual culture. She is also interested in how these economic and social transitions affected the imperial aesthetics of the Portuguese and Spanish Empires in the Americas.

Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University (from Fall 2014)

Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
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Nicolette Lee grew up in a very small town in northern New Jersey, and received her B.A. in East Asian Studies from Bryn Mawr College. She spent a year in Yokohama, Japan and studied at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies. After this program, she continued on to earn her master’s degree at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver with an interest in nuns and convents of the early modern period. She received an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from USC in 2017. Her research interests include premodern Japanese Buddhism, social history, and women’s agency.

Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
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Born in Sacramento, California, Kathryn Page-Lippsmeyer spent her formative years in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.  She earned her first B.A. in Modern Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1997. After graduation she spent seven years in various administrative and project management positions and returned to academia to earn her second B.A. in Asian Studies from the University of Texas, Austin, where she also earned an M.A. in Asian Studies with an emphasis on Modern Japanese Literature.  Her dissertation is an interdisciplinary literary and visual studies investigation of the contradictions within the aesthetic space created by the longest running Japanese science fiction magazine’s cover illustrators and how those inconsistencies affected the function and articulation of the “posthuman”. More broadly, she is interested in the relationships between “high” and “genre” literature and subculture, between image and imagination, and between fan and genre as it relates to Japanese science fiction, contemporary fiction, cinema, and digital texts. Other current research interests include investigating multi-author fiction made possible by digital technologies, with an emphasis on the architectures of digital communities.

Current Affiliation: Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Southern California

Department of History
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Dan Sherer received his B.A. and M.A. from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at USC, before becoming a Ph.D. student in the Department of History.

Current Affiliation: Professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem