Prof. Dr. Kristina IWATA-WEICKGENANNT

My name is Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt, and I am an associate professor teaching Japanese modern literature in the Japan-in-Asia Cultural Studies Program at Nagoya University. My work has focused on geographies of marginality and marginalization in contemporary Japanese literature. Specifically, I have published on Zainichi Korean literature, literary representations of precarity, and cultural responses to the 3/11-“Fukushima” disaster of 2011.

My research is informed by the frameworks of gender studies, post-colonial literature studies, and, increasingly, eco-critical approaches to literature. I have been a member of EAJS since the 2005 Vienna conference—which, as many will remember, memorably overlapped with the Hurricane Katrina—and have not missed a conference since. I have attended many other conferences since, but the EAJS conferences remain a sort of home base where I feel best connected. After all those years as a participant, I would welcome the opportunity to give something in return.