About the Nineteenth-Century Edo Project

The Nineteenth-Century Edo Project is supported by funds provided by a Spring/Summer Research Grant from the Rackham Partnership Program and a Social Science and Humanities Fellowship from the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program at the University of Michigan.

Jonathan Zwicker is Assistant Professor of Japanese Culture in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. Professor Zwicker works on the literature and cultural history of 19th-century Japan and is the author of Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama the Novel and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Harvard Asia Center, 2006). Professor Zwicker has also contributed essays to The Novel (Princeton, 2006) and The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel and Novel Criticism (Blackwell, forthcoming 2009) and is currently writing a book on Stage and Spectacle in an Age of Print: Drama and Cultural Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Edo.

Maki Fukuoka is Assistant Professor of Japanese Humanities in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. Professor Fukuoka was trained as an art historian at the University of Chicago and works on the history of 19th-century Japanese visual culture and the history of photography. Professor Fukuoka is the author of "Contextualizing the Peep-Box in Tokugawa Japan" (Early Popular Visual Culture, May 2005) and "Toward a Synthesized History of Photography: a Conceptual Genealogy of Shashin" (positions: east asia critique, forthcoming) and is currently completing a book titled Between Seeing and Knowing: Shifting Standards of Accuracy and the Concept of Shashin in Japan, 1830-1872.

Molly Des Jardin holds a BA in Japanese History and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh and is a third year PhD student in Japanese literature in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. Molly is currently researching the construction of authorship in Meiji Japan and will apply to the University of Michigan School of Information in the fall of 2008, in order to work towards becoming an academic librarian.

Ashley Thurston is a senior honors concentrator in Japanese studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and is currently researching the lives of Americans resident in late 19th-century Japan for a senior thesis.