School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 11-20 of 140 Results
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Ayu Majima
Affiliate, Center for East Asian Studies
Visiting Scholar, Center for East Asian StudiesBioAyu Majima is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) at Stanford University and an Associate Professor at Meiji University in Tokyo, Japan. She works at the intersection of modern Japanese social and cultural history, the history of sensibilities, and anthropological and sociological approaches to everyday life, family, and contemporary society—grounded in a Japan–U.S. comparative perspective.
Ayu Majima conducts interdisciplinary research on modern and contemporary Japanese society and culture, examining how Japan has reinterpreted and reconfigured its own modernity through encounters with the United States. Her work employs a Japan–U.S. comparative perspective to illuminate the interplay between everyday life, family, and the cultural sensibilities that shape them.
Her first monograph, The Melancholy of Skin Color: Racial Experience in Modern Japan (in Japanese, Chūōkōron-Shinsha, 2014), received the Rengō-Sundaikai Academic Prize and later appeared in a Chinese edition published by the Social Sciences Academic Press (Beijing) in 2021. She has also explored the modern history of meat-eating in Japan, with her research featured in ARTE’s Invitation au Voyage, and has examined the global circulation of Japanese food culture in a cultural policy study commissioned by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs.
Building on her postdoctoral work at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University—where she presented “The Chrysanthemum and the Foot: Civilization, Cleanliness and Shame in Modern Japan”—Majima continues to investigate modern Japanese subjectivity across three interrelated dimensions: everyday life practices such as Japan’s rejection of outdoor shoes and the cultural role of slippers; family structures, including the marginal emotional presence of fathers and patterns of mother–child overcloseness; and cultural sensibilities, especially concepts of cleanliness and shame.
At Stanford, Majima is developing a new ethnographic and cultural project based on a concept she herself has coined, provisionally titled “The California Paradox.” This term—her original analytic formulation—examines how wealth, competition, and contemporary forms of capitalism, including wellness capitalism, are reshaping the conditions, expectations, and trajectories of human life in the Bay Area (and increasingly, the world). Early reflections from this project appear in her monthly essay series “Japan Code,” published in Jiji Press’s financial journal Kin’yū Zaisei Business (Tokyo, Japan). -
Liisa Malkki
Professor of Anthropology, Emerita
BioLiisa H. Malkki is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research interests include: the politics of nationalism, internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and human rights discourses as transnational cultural forms; the social production of historical memory and the uses of history; political violence, exile, and displacement; the ethics and politics of humanitarian aid; child research; and visual culture. Her field research in Tanzania exlored the ways in which political violence and exile may produce transformations of historical consciousness and national identity among displaced people. This project resulted in Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (University of Chicago Press, 1995). In another project, Malkki explored how Hutu exiles from Burundi and Rwanda, who found asylum in Montreal, Canada, imagined scenarios of the future for themselves and their countries in the aftermath of genocide in the Great Lakes Region of Africa. Malkki’s most recent book, Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork (with Allaine Cerwonka) was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. Her most recent book-length project (based on fieldwork from 1995 to the present) examines the changing interrelationships among humanitarian interventions, internationalism, professionalism, affect, and neutrality in the work of the Finnish Red Cross in cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross.
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Peter Mann
Lecturer
BioPeter Mann is a writer and historian of Modern Europe. He is the author of the novel THE TORQUED MAN (Harper, 2022), about the double life of an Irish spy in wartime Berlin, and named one of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2022. His second novel WORLD PACIFIC is forthcoming from HarperCollins in August, 2025.
Mann is interested in 19th- and 20th-century literature and history, especially where they intersect with politics and the absurd. He is also a cartoonist, with work featured in The Baffler, Brick, and GoComics, and currently publishes comics on his Substack newsletter "The Quixote Syndrome."
At Stanford Mann teaches the first-year Foundations sequence of the Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) program, a syllabus in literature, history, and art, with readings that span the ancient epic to the contemporary novel. Before coming to the MLA, he taught for several years in Stanford's residential freshman humanities program, Structured Liberal Education. He also regularly teaches courses in Stanford Continuing Studies, including: "Modernism in the Metropolis: Artists and Intellectuals in the European City, 1848-1945" and "Modernity and its Discontents: European Thought and Culture from Fin de Siècle to World War II."
