Beginning in 2021-2022, the center welcomes Postdoctoral Fellows in Japanese Studies for appointments spanning the academic year. Postdoctoral Fellows teach two courses over the academic year and participate in center events and related activities at U-M. Their research can cover any historical period of Japan—including contemporary Japan—and involve any academic discipline in the humanities and social sciences.
Postdoctoral Fellows 2024-25
Kirsten Seuffert
CJS Postdoctoral Fellow | seuffert@umich.edu
Kirsten Seuffert holds a PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Southern California with a focus on postwar and contemporary cinema in Japan as well as a graduate certificate in visual studies. She received her master’s degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania with research centering on cinema, gender, and sexuality. Her dissertation project—“Adjusting Images: Women’s Bodies and Embodied Experience in Cinema and Visual Culture in Japan, 1974–1989”—takes a multidisciplinary, multimedia approach in order to look differently at cinema in Japan during the later 1970s and 1980s through the lenses of gender, bodies, and everyday life. Her research interests include performance, authorship, the writing of media histories, affect, and subcultural participation and representation. Her publications include the article “Exploding Girls, Imploding Strategies: Media-Mixed Bodies in Late 1970s to 1980s Japanese Women’s Professional Wrestling,” published in the Winter 2023 issue of Mechademia, and an upcoming article in JCMS: The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Currently, Kirsten is working on her book manuscript and researching recent biopics and bio-adaptations that look back on cinema in Japan from the 1960s through the 1980s.
Maura Stephens-Chu
CJS Postdoctoral Fellow | mhsc@umich.edu
Maura Stephens-Chu has served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University in Oxford, OH. She received her PhD and MA in Anthropology from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. She specializes in medical and cultural anthropology, with an emphasis on embodied experiences of menstruation in contemporary Japan. Broadly, Maura’s multidisciplinary and intersectional research includes theoretical and methodological approaches from anthropology, Japanese studies, gender studies, history, and science and technology studies. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Tokyo, Japan, on young women’s perceptions, education, and personal experiences of menstruation and commercial menstrual products. Her historical analysis of Japanese menstrual taboos, “From Sacred to Secret: Tracing Changes in Views of Menstruation in Japan,” can be found in the open access journal, Silva Iaponicarum. Currently, Maura is researching the formation of both layperson and medical understandings of conditions that fall under the umbrella of menstrual “irregularity,” including endometriosis, amenorrhea, and severe dysmenorrhea.
