RIJS People

Postdoctoral Fellows 2007-2008

 

Hwansoo Kim
Ph.D. Harvard University, 2007
hkim@fas.harvard.edu

Dr. Hwansoo Kim received his Ph.D. in the Study of Religion from Harvard University in 2007, his M.T.S. from Harvard University Divinity School in 2002, and his B.A. from Dongguk University in Seoul, Korea in 1996. He is fluent in Korean and Japanese and proficient in Classical Chinese, Sanskrit, German, and French.

Dr. Kim's dissertation, "Towards a New History of Japanese and Korean Buddhist Relations (1877-1912)," explores the distinctive relationship between Japanese and Korean Buddhism. He offers a more complex analysis of the relationship than conventional scholarship's binary interpretations, such as imperialism versus nationalism. He reveals instead a dynamic interaction between the two Buddhisms, marked by both collaboration and contestation, convergence and divergence, as they were driven by the contemporary transformations of state, religion and culture. During his year at the Reischauer Institute and beyond, Dr. Kim plans to extend the research presented in his dissertation to examine the relationship between Japanese and Korean Buddhism in two subsequent periods, from 1912 to 1937, and from 1937 to 1945. He will also be translating Enshu Rokuteiron, a work by Takeda Hanshi written in classical Chinese.

 

Federico Marcon
Ph.D. Columbia University, 2007
marcon@fas.harvard.edu

Dr. Federico Marcon began studying Japanese language and culture at the Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia, Italy, where he graduated in 1998 with a thesis on Motoori Norinaga's theory of knowledge after one year of research at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. He then spent an additional year and a half at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies as a Japanese Ministry of Education Graduate Research Fellow. In 2001 he entered the graduate program of Columbia University, where he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in the History – East Asia Program in May 2007, after a 14-month research period at Waseda University with a Japan Foundation fellowship.

His dissertation, "The Names of Nature: The Development of Natural History in Japan, 1600-1900," reconstructs the establishment of honzōgaku, often translated as "pharmacology" but encompassing much of "natural history," as a flourishing field of professional study and practice. He analyzes honzōgaku texts and practices in the social and cultural context of Tokugawa Japan and, by comparing them to practices and theories of natural history that European scholars were developing simultaneously and independently, he examines how honzōgaku specialists pursued the field with such fervor at this point in history.

 

 

Matthew Marr
Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles, 2007
mmarr@fas.harvard.edu

Dr. Matthew Marr received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, in June 2007, his M.A. in Sociology with a focus on Urban Sociology from Howard University in May 1997, and his B.A. in Government and Japanese, with a minor in East Asian Studies from the University of Notre Dame in 1993. He began studying Japanese at Polytechnic High School in Long Beach, California. Dr. Marr has done extensive work with agencies aiding the homeless in several cities in the U.S. and Japan. While managing a research project in Los Angeles County from February 1998 through June 1999, he was the lead analyst and author of a report that was used to overturn a five-month limit on general relief benefits to the indigent there.

Dr. Marr's dissertation examines the persistence of mass urban homelessness in leading cities of the global economy, and he lays out the experiences and outcomes of the efforts to exit homelessness by people in Tokyo and Los Angeles He examines how forces at multiple levels of analysis, from the global to the individual, impact the homeless condition. While researching at the Reischauer Institute, he will build upon this current framework to focus on factors and processes effecting homelessness in Tokyo and Los Angeles at the micro-social, individual, and local policy levels. 

 

 

Samuel Perry
Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2007
seperry@fas.harvard.edu

Dr. Samuel Perry specializes in Japanese and Korean modern literatures, and he is a joint postdoctoral fellow of the Reischauer Institute and the Korea Institute. He spent a year in Japan while completing his B.A. in East Asian Studies at Brown University, and continued his language and culture studies abroad for a year in Germany and two years in Japan before commencing his graduate work at the University of Chicago. He has also lived for several years in Seoul and Hokkaido. Dr. Perry earned his M.A. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations in 2000 and his Ph.D. in the same field in 2007 from the University of Chicago.

His dissertation, entitled "Aesthetics for Justice: Proletarian Literature in Japan and Colonial Korea," explores the Japanese and Korean literary works, authors, and institutions that comprised the proletarian cultural movement of the late 1920s and early 1930s. He examines the popular genres of "the wall novel" and proletarian children's literature, as well as more revolutionary works critiquing capitalism, intellectualism and patriarchy. In the coming months, Dr. Perry intends to broaden his research of the literary medium to include the proletarian dramatic movement and revolutionary poetry.

 

 

Gavin Whitelaw
Ph.D. Yale University, 2007
whitelaw@fas.harvard.edu

Dr. Gavin Whitelaw received is B.A. from Wesleyan University in Russian and Soviet Studies in 1993, followed by his A.M. in Regional Studies – East Asia at Harvard University in 2001. He spent the remainder of his graduate career at Yale University where he earned his M. Phil and Ph.D., both in Sociocultural Anthropology, in 2004 and 2007 respectively. While collecting data for is dissertation, he worked for over a year as a clerk at convenience stores (konbini) in central Tokyo and rural Yamagata. From this ethnographic vantage point, he observed the daily confluence of consumers, workers, owners, corporations, and state interests within the everyday commercial and social space of these neighborhood stores. In Fall 2008, Dr. Whitelaw will join the faculty of International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo as Associate Professor of Anthropology.

Dr. Whitelaw's dissertation, "At Your Konbini in Contemporary Japan: Modern Service, Local Familiarity, and the Global Transformation of the Convenience Store," reveals the necessarily creative, local diversity in this apparently standardized store format. Further, he focuses on the konbini as the epitome of how the service sector of late modern economies is a motor for and a mirror of economic and social change. In his continuing research, he examines the restructuring experiences of regional Japan and questions the imminence of urbanization within formulations of service sector expansion.