Nobuko Yamasaki

Nobuko Ishitate-Okunomiya Yamasaki is Associate Professor of Japanese. Dr. Yamasaki is a scholar of comparative literature. Her research and teaching focus on literature, film, and art from the perspectives of gender & sexuality, affect & trauma theories, and memory & history. Her book, Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire: Fragmenting History (2021), examines women’s bodies as battlefields, where asymmetrical power dynamics meet, compete and complicate one another, producing narratives to be challenged, fragmented, and re-articulated from within. It explores the fates of women who did not or could not buy into the Japanese imperial ideology of "good wives, wise mothers" (ryōsai kenbo) in support of male empire-building. While in the graduate school of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, she first came to the United States as an exchange student at Cornell University, where she earned an MA in Asian Studies. She then moved to Seattle. She received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington. Before coming to Lehigh, she taught Japanese language and literature, comparative literature, and women’s studies at the University of Washington and Kenyon College. In 2023, She published Passing, Posing, Persuasion from the University of Hawaii Press with members of Zainichi Studies Consortium. She is one of the founding members that formed the Consortium. Its inaugural conference took place here at Lehigh University in 2017. She publishes in both English and Japanese. She is now writing her second monograph. Additionally, she is working on the next edited volume on the theme of hikiage (repatriation). Dr. Yamasaki is serving on the MLA Executive Committee (Japanese since 1900 forum).