I realize that aside from my conference reflection more than a year ago and my piece of Mononoke-hime, I have done very little to give anyone a sense of my academic background. Certainly, I am a ‘historian-in-training’, an academic at heart, and a creative mess. However, that really doesn’t open the floor up for discussion, as it leave too much to the wind. What have I worked on and researched in the past? How have I engaged with cultural history on a level of serious academic contemplation? What topics draw my interest. Well, as a start to this new week, I thought I world provide a list of titles of papers I have completed. Some, which are sort, I have thought of posting to my blog at one point (as I did the Mononoke piece); others I have presented at conferences, or thought of submitting them for possible publication.
Below I have divided them by area (History, Religious Studies, English Literature, Theatre, and then Misc.), but they are in no chronological order. While I will likely not share the entirety of the work, I am more than willing to talk about the process of research and writing, and of course discussion centring around the topics themselves.
History and Cultural Studies
- The Postwar Apocalypse in Japan: The Unique Anxieties Reflected by Akira and Gojira
- Shame and Destruction: How the Japanese Military Leaders Delayed Admitting the Truth of the Ianjo of World War II
- The Survival of a Fragile World: The Geisha Through Modernization
- The Importance of the Cultural Gift: Mishima and Japanese Modernization
- Stonehenge: A multifunctional neolithic Megalith
- The Sixties Sexual Revolution on Broadway: Androgyny and Female Sexuality in Hair and Cabaret
- The Questionable Universality of Balibar’s The Nation Form
- The Byzantine Empire During the Early 10th-11th Century: The Bulgarians and Internal Strife
- The Fatalistic Pilgrimage in Japan: Aokigahara-jukai and the Translocation of Mount Fuji’s Sacred Identity
- In the Midst of Horror: Japanese pre-modern Ghost stories and the Modern J-Horror- A Research Proposal
- Medical Observations and Methods of Treatment in Hippocratian Greece
- Xenophobia and the ‘Enemy Alien’: The Injustice of the Canadian Internment Camps of World War I
- Jonathan Spence: The Voice of Modern Chinese History in the West
- The Nation of the Family in Eat, Drink, Man, Woman by Ang Lee
- Folktales and Superstition During the Late Heian and Kamakura Periods: Reflection of Moral and Cultural Behaviour
- Prostitution in Roman Society: Female Prostitution as Social Support
- The Stigma of Shell-shock and the Disabled Soldier: European Soldiers and the Perception of Psychological Disability
Religious Studies
- Buddhism and the Modern Ghost in Eiji Otsuka’s Manga The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service
- The Visuals of Religious Subjectivity in Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter . . . and Spring
- The Dichotomy of Order and Chaos in Ugetsu and Double Suicide
- Moro and the Shishigami in Miyazaki’s Temporal War Epic Mononoke-hime
- Children, Nature, and Spiritual Play in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away
- Elements of Buddhist Teaching and Though in Takahashi Rumiko’s Character Miroku
- The Fictional Journeys of Rama and Monkey: A Mirror of the Internal Spiritual Journey
- Myth, Folklore, and the Folk Tale: Their Relevance in the Practice of Shinto
Theatre Arts/Studies/Dramaturgy and Art History
- The Inorganic Puppet: A Symbol of Life and Death
- The Puppet in History and the Theories of Craig
- The Sexual Politics Behind the Shrew: Marowitz’s The Shrew and Junger’s 10 Things I Hate About You
- The Intermingling of Ritual and Carnival: The Castle of Perseverance and the Medieval Tournament
- Zeus and Bacchus: The Gods in Statue
English Literature and Classical Studies
- “I Am No Lady”: George R.R. Martin’s Brienne of Tarth as a Unique Female Warrior
- The Mad Wives of Bronte and Stetson
- The Desired Influence: The Women of Epic and Their Social Significance
- The Importance of Nestor in The Iliad
- Mirror, Mirror: The Mirroring of Frankenstein and the Creature
- Women and War: Sparta, Athens, and Rome
- The Ghost Story as told by Gaskell and Wharton
- Artistotle’s Doctrine of the Mean: The Understandable and Achievable Goal
- The Rebirth and Adaptation of Greek Myth in Xena Warrior Princess
