Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture

This newly-established speaker series seeks to give a forum to Japan-inflected issues relating to the growing field of Environmental Humanities. Environmental Humanities encompasses a broad range of ever-evolving subfields including but not limited to climate justice, animal studies, ecocriticism, environmental ethics, posthumanism, and biosemantics. It seeks to acknowledge indigenous knowledge about biosystems alongside of more well-known “Western” and “Eastern” regimes of knowledge. Professor Christine Marran, long at the forefront of ecocritical research on modern Japanese literature, is the inaugural speaker of this series.

The Hapa Japan Project focuses on the study of mixed-race and mixed-roots Japanese people globally.

Japanese cooking has made an indelible mark on global culinary culture. This newly-inaugurated speaker series will provide a venue for analyses of Japan’s rich regional and national Japanese food traditions, from the Nara Period to the present. Food Studies is an inherently interdisciplinary undertaking. Our intention is to sponsor events that showcase the work of one or more speakers and bring together researchers in the humanities, organic sciences, agriculturalists, environmentalists, and, of course, chefs. The inaugural lecture, in February of 2023, welcomed renowned Japan food historian Prof. Eric Rath, who presented on fermentation and the premodern origins of sushi, and Michelin star-winning Chef David Schlosser of Shibumi DTLA, who provided audience members with a sampling of narezushi from the famed Uoji Honten in Shiga Prefecture.

The purpose of this speaker series is to explore overlapping concerns of LGBTQ Studies, Japan Studies, and Japanese American Studies. We sponsor events that showcase the latest developments in research and activism, with an aim to foster candid, constructive, and mutually beneficial dialogue among all participants.

Faculty Member: Joan Piggott
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The Project for Premodern Japan Studies of the USC College was established in 2003 to nurture and coordinate the study of premodern Japan at USC. Under Director Joan R. Piggott, Gordon L. MacDonald Professor of History, the mission of the Project is to build a premier program and a thriving community of scholars working in the premodern Japan field at USC. The priorities of the Project include the recruitment of leading faculty and graduate students in the field to multiple disciplines across the university. The Project serves as a center for the organization of the Summer Kambun Workshop; the development of a world-class premodern Japan research collection in USC’s East Asian Library; the coordination of a vibrant Visitor Series that includes speakers, workshops, and conferences; and a new Monograph Series under the USC College East Asia Studies Center imprint. Through the Graduate College and History Department the Project also provides fellowships for graduate study in premodern Japanese History.

Project Period: January 2013 ~ June 2014

Faculty Members: 
Duncan Williams, School of Religion
Brian Bernards, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Velina Hasu Houston, School of Dramatic Arts
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As an interdisciplinary collaboration, “Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach” undertakes two overarching scholarly imperatives: first, to trace the history and historiography of mixed race in academic, popular, and legal discourses of various countries of the Pacific Rim (North and Latin America, the Pacific Islands, and East, Southeast, and South Asia), with a primary focus on the United States and East Asia; and second, to identify and measure the impact of transpacific migration, settlement, and sociocultural encounter and interaction on these mixed-race histories and historiographies. The project involves a series of ten regular seminars, conferences, and lectures designed to encourage broad, interdisciplinary debate connecting different historical periods and seemingly disparate or far-flung regions of the world, such as comparative racial ideology in Europe and Japan, comparative antimiscegenation laws in the American South and Pacific Coast, and comparative plantation culture in Hawai‘i, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia.