Noon Lecture Series

2009-10 Series 

Fall 2009

 

September 17 - Joshua Mostow (Professor, Asian Studies; University of British Columbia)
Allusion and Authority: The Love-Song of Lord Takafusa and Its Illustrated Scroll

(Co-sponsored by The Association of Asian Studies.)

September 24 - Mizue Sasaki (Professor, Language and Culture; Musashino University, Tokyo)

Rediscovering and Recreating Gendered Words in Japanese

(Co-sponsored by the following Western Michigan University units: Japanese Program, Dept. of Foreign Languages; Soga Japan Center; Gender & Women's Studies Program; and the College of Arts & Sciences.)

October 1 - Reiko Tomii (Independent Scholar)
A Peripheral Vision: “International Contemporaneity” in Japanese Art Discourse, Circa 1970

October 8 - Due to another CJS event, there will not be a lecture on this day.

October 15 - Adam Kern (Associate Professor, Japanese Literature; University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Dirty Sexy Haiku: Senryû, Bareku, and the Perversification of Haikai
October 22 - Allen Hockley (Associate Professor, Art History; Dartmouth College)
Image and Imagination in Meiji Photographs

October 29 - Lori Watt (Assistant Professor; History, International & Area Studies; Washington University in St. Louis)
Who Belongs Where? The Allies and the Ethnic Sorting of East Asia, 1945-46
November 5 - Timothy Vance (Professor, East Asian Studies; University of Arizona)
Benjamin Smith Lyman and Rendaku

November 12 - Kenji Matsuo (Professor, Human Sciences & Cultural Studies; Yamagata University)
Death and Buddhism in the Middle Ages: From the Standpoint of the Model of "Official Monks" and "Reclusive Monks"

November 19 - Paul Barclay (Associate Professor, History; Lafayette College)
Taming the Formosan Savage: The Japanese Colonial Postcard as Photograph, Object, and Image

December 3 - Karen Fraser (Lecturer, Art & Art History; Santa Clara University)
Sitting Pretty: Portrait Photography and Gender in Meiji Japan 

 

Winter 2010

 

January 14 - Mary Brinton (Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology; Harvard University)

Lost in Transition: Young Workers in Japan's Changed Employment Landscape

(Co-sponsored by the Japan Foundation's Center for Global Partnership.)

January 21 - David Leheny (Henry Wendt III '55 Professor of East Asian Studies, East Asian Studies, Princeton University)

The Short, Strange Life of Japan's Values Diplomacy

(Co-sponsored by the Japan Foundation's Center for Global Partnership.)

January 28 - Chikako Ozawa de Silva (Assistant Professor, Anthropology; Emory University)

Suicide and the Social Self: Youth, Government, and Popular Culture Responses to Internet Group Suicide in Japan

February 4 - Bai Gao (Professor, Sociology; Duke University)

Japan and the Global Financial Crisis

(Co-sponsored by the Japan Foundation's Center for Global Partnership.)

February 11 - Sachiko Bamba (Post Doctoral Research Associate, Social Work; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Children's Ibasho and Adults' Mimamori: Implications of Japanese Concepts to U.S. Child Welfare

February 18 - Julia Adeney Thomas (Associate Professor, History, University of Notre Dame; 2009-10 Toyota Visiting Professor, CJS)

Intimate Trauma, Cool Distance: Photographic Politics in 1950s Japan
February 25 - Sabine Frühstück (Professor, East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies; The University of California, Santa Barbara)
Playing War: On the Militarization of Childhood in the Twentieth Century

March 11 - Atsuko Ueda (Assistant Professor, East Asian Studies; Princeton University)
Kan as the Haunted Other: Linguistic Reforms in Meiji Japan

March 18 - Richard Jaffe (Creed C. Black Associate Professor of Religion; Duke University)

Kawaguchi Eikai's "True Buddhism": Continental Asia and Japanese Buddhist Reform

March 25 - Paul Dunlap (Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; The University of Michigan)

Inquilism and Domestic Enslavement on a Coral Reef: The Curious Biology of the Cardinalfish Hikari-ishimochi

April 1 - Christine Guth (Tutor, History of Design; Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum, UK)
Hokusai's Great Waves and the Maritime Turn in Japanese Visual Culture

 

All lectures are on Thursdays at 12 noon.

Room 1636, School of Social Work Building (1080 S. University, Ann Arbor)

Lectures are free and open to the public. 
Audience members are encouraged to bring brown-bag lunches.

CJS's Noon Lecture Series is sponsored in part by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant.

 

November 2009 Events

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December 03, 2009
12:00PM - 01:00PM, Room 1636, School of Social Work Building, 1080 S. University, Ann Arbor

"Sitting Pretty: Portrait Photography and Gender in Meiji Japan," Karen Fraser - CJS Noon Lecture

Further Information:

This talk examines a range of gendered social practices connected to portrait photography in the second half of the Meiji period (1868-1912). Portraiture was one of the earliest and most widespread genres of photography in nineteenth century Japan. High prices and limited availability of both the necessary equipment and skilled photographers meant that only foreigners, the wealthy, or the well-connected had portraits made in the 1860s. However, by the late 1870s there were literally dozens of portrait photographers in Tokyo alone, and studios were found even in rural areas by the end of the century. Gender figured not only in the formal qualities of portrait photos, but in their functions as well. From miai (arranged marriage) to beauty contests to commemorating the war dead, portrait photographs revealed striking gender differences in their varied uses. Focusing especially on the intersection of portrait photography with print media and on portraits of women, the speaker explores the role of gender in portraiture and its connection to constructions of cultural identity.

 

Karen Fraser teaches in the Department of Art and Art History at Santa Clara University. Her research focuses on modern Japanese visual culture, particularly photography production and reception within Japan; the role of early photographic books in cultural exchange; and the relationship of photography to class, gender, and national identity.

 

Note: This lecture is part of CJS's special "History of Photograph" series.

 

Description:
Free and Open to the Public.

Contact Information: 734.764.6307 or umcjs@umich.edu

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