Tokyo Humanities Project is a non-profit, independent group, founded in 2016, and run by Tokyo-based academics.
Our aim is to connect humanities researchers in Tokyo, and make research more visible to an international audience.
We began as a Facebook page listing forthcoming literature and history events (aiming to solve the difficulty of finding out about talks at other universities). We soon broadened our reach to the "humanities" in general (including philosophy, politics, music, sociology, etc), focusing on English-language, international, or interdisciplinary events.
In 2017, we set up the tokyohumanities.org website. Our first "humanities cafe", providing a physical space for researchers to meet up in Shimokitazawa, was held in June 2017. The first in our series of reports on the state of the humanities in Japan will be published in May 2019.
One of our long-term aims is to promote Tokyo / Japan as a space for research and scholarly collaboration, and to provide a "Japan-based perspective" on issues affecting the international academic community.
Our aim is to connect humanities researchers in Tokyo, and make research more visible to an international audience.
We began as a Facebook page listing forthcoming literature and history events (aiming to solve the difficulty of finding out about talks at other universities). We soon broadened our reach to the "humanities" in general (including philosophy, politics, music, sociology, etc), focusing on English-language, international, or interdisciplinary events.
In 2017, we set up the tokyohumanities.org website. Our first "humanities cafe", providing a physical space for researchers to meet up in Shimokitazawa, was held in June 2017. The first in our series of reports on the state of the humanities in Japan will be published in May 2019.
One of our long-term aims is to promote Tokyo / Japan as a space for research and scholarly collaboration, and to provide a "Japan-based perspective" on issues affecting the international academic community.
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Laurence Williams (founding editor) is an associate professor in the Department of English Studies at Sophia University, Tokyo. After finishing a PhD at Oxford in eighteenth-century literature, he came to Japan in 2012 on a JSPS fellowship at the University of Tokyo, and liked the city so much he stayed on.
His research examines British travel writing in the Enlightenment and Victorian periods: he is particularly interested in how diplomatic and trade relations affect the images of Japan and China in literature and popular culture. In his spare time, he jogs obsessively. |
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Samantha Landau is a project associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo (Komaba), where she teaches courses focusing on American and Comparative Literature and Culture. After completing her B.A. at Cornell University, she traveled to Tokyo to continue her studies and was awarded a Ph.D. in Comparative Cultures from International Christian University.
Her research primarily concerns women's writing, psychoanalysis, and Gothic fiction, but she is also interested in the connections between poetry and music. She is currently working on turning her dissertation into a monograph and planning an international conference on Gothic fiction in 2019. Samantha has been singing and performing classical music for over 20 years and currently studies with Professor Nagashima of Kunitachi College of Music. She enjoys dancing ballet, watching suspense films, listening to jazz, and is an avid fan of American football. You can find her photolog on Instagram (arabesks). She tweets at @broomsticknpen. |
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Alex Watson is the main organiser of Tokyo Humanities Cafe. He is currently Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Letters, Meiji University (Tokyo). He holds a D.Phil. in English from the University of York. His research focuses on Romanticism, Marginalia, Gothic Fiction and cinema.
Alex’s recent major publications include British Romanticism in Asia: The Reception, Translation, and Transformation of Romantic Literature in India and East Asia (2019) co-edited with Laurence Williams, and Romantic Marginality: Nation and Empire on the Borders of the Page (2012). His articles for general readers appear on Wall Street International and Kyoto Journal on a regular basis. Find more about Alex at his personal website and follow him on Twitter. |
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Koji Yamamoto is associate professor in business history at the Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo.
A graduate of Keio University, he studied eighteenth-century studies and history at the University of York, and subsequently held postdoctoral positions at London, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Paris and Cambridge. He works on the history of capitalism, and is a co-founder of PoETS, the monthly Political Economy Tokyo Seminar. He tweets at koji_hist. When not in libraries, Koji enjoys cooking, reading, walking, swimming, and listening to jazz and classical music. He also loves cheesy J-pop from the 90s. |
Follow our Facebook and Twitter accounts for news and updates.
To feature an event on our website and social media, see here.
Email us for general inquiries and to discuss new initiatives.
Or just send us a message below.
To feature an event on our website and social media, see here.
Email us for general inquiries and to discuss new initiatives.
Or just send us a message below.
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