Alisa Freedman
Assistant Professor, Japanese
Ph.D., 2002, University of Chicago
Email: alisaf@uoregon.edu
Interests:
My teaching and research interests include issues in Japanese literature, visual media, popular culture, and cultural history pertaining to gender, modernism and modernity, globalization, and urban studies. I am also interested in the theories and practice of translation. Much of my work investigates how the urban experience has shaped human subjectivity and cultural production. I explore how city stories capture, in creative and thought-provoking ways, aspects of daily life often omitted from historical accounts and expose the effects of social and spatial change on the individual. My current research focuses on fictional and artistic depictions of the ways increased use of mass transportation changed Tokyo's social fabric. I am also researching images of youth and urban development in Japanese literature and culture and am engaged in many literary translation projects.
Selected Publications:
Book: Annotated translation of Yasunari Kawabata, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (Asakusa kurenaidan), Illustrated by Ôta Saburô, Foreword and Afterword by Donald Richie, University of California Press, 2005, Reviewed in the New York Review of Books, Library Journal, Village Voice, and Japan Times. http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10224.html
Book Manuscript: Culture on the Rails: Stories of Tokyo Trains, Stations, and Passengers, 1900–1940.
Edited Book: Donald Richie, Japanese Literature Reviewed, Tokyo: ICG Muse, Inc. 2003.
Selected Articles:
"Stories of Boys and Buildings: Ishida Ira's 4-Teen in 2002 Tokyo," Japan Forum, Special issue on Tokyo in Literature, November 2006.
"Review of Iwabuchi Koichi, ed., Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese Television Dramas," Asian Journal of Communication (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group). Volume 15, February 2005.
"Stories of Salarymen and Trains: Exposing the Erotic and Mundane of Late 1920s Tokyo Life," Sophia AGLOS Working Papers Series, Number 2, Spring 2004.
"Commuting Gazes: Female Students, Salarymen, and Electric Trains in 1907 Tokyo," Journal of Transport History, Volume 23, March 2002.
"Strangers on a Commuter Train: Female Students and the Salaryman Who Watched Them in Early Twentieth Century Japanese Literature," OeZG, Special issue on women, traffic, and the city, Summer 2000.
"Chikan no ai: Tayama Katai no Shôjo byô o komakaku miru," Shû (Waseda University Japanese literature journal), March 1999.
Selected Literary Translations:
Ogawa Yôko, "Transit" (Toranjitto), Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Volume XV, December 2003. Reprinted in Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Volume XVI December 2004 at the request of the editors. Also forthcoming in the new edition of Japanese Women Writers, edited by Noriko Mizuta Lippit and Kyoko Iriye Selden, M.E. Sharpe.
Saegusa Kazuko, "The Cherry Blossom Train" (Sakura densha), co-translated with Kyoko Selden, Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Volume XVI, December 2004. Also forthcoming in the new edition of Japanese Women Writers, edited by Noriko Mizuta Lippit and Kyoko Iriye Selden, M.E. Sharpe.
Chong Ui Shin, Winter Sunflower (Fuyu no himawari), four-act play, Performing Arts in Japan Initiative, Japan Foundation, 2004. Performances in London and publication forthcoming.
Nagai Ai, Light and Darkness for Our Times (Shin meian), four-act play based on a feminist interpretation of Natsume Sôseki's unfinished 1916 novel Meian, 2003. Performed in London at the Bush Theatre from March 2003 and forthcoming publication.