Ayako  Takamori

Ayako Takamori’s research is driven by an enduring interest in how belonging and identities are negotiated and mediated across borders and in post-conflict contexts. She is completing a book, Traversing Borders: Japanese American Positionings in Japan, about Japanese American transpacific migration as shaped through the shifting history of US-Japan relations. Her publications include “Rethinking Japanese American ‘Heritage’ in the Homeland” in Critical Asian Studies, "Strange Japanese [Henna Nihonogo]: On the Linguistic Baggage of Racial Strangeness” in the Journal of Japanese Language and Literature. And “Fault Lines of Occupation, Limits of Hybridity: Race, Class & Transnationalism Okinawa” in the book, Beyond American Occupation: Race and Agency in Okinawa (H. Matsuda and P. Iacobelli, ed.).

Takamori brings a unique background to the department that includes gender and sexuality studies and anthropology, as well as postdoctoral experience at the University of Tokyo through the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, during which she began research in Okinawa on military occupation and mixed-race politics. She is currently writing on transnational debates about cultural appropriation and the semiotics of racial representations in global popular media. Her most recent project thinks comparatively through the racialization of wilderness spaces, particularly at the intersection of embodiment and outdoor sports in ecological imaginings.