Are you someone with a general interest in Japanese culture and society? Or are you a sixth form student or current university student, either studying Japanese language or with an interest in learning more about Japan? Come to the next talk in our series Exploring the World of Japanese Studies, hosted by Durham University!

Talk Description

This lecture series brings together diverse expertise related to twentieth-century Japan at Durham University, in areas including modern languages, history, and music.

Following the introduction to the Japanese Collections at the Oriental Museum (by Rachel Barclay), this talk will feature three case studies:

1. Polls and petitions as interactive media shaping public opinion from the 1880s to 1920s by Dr Adam Bronson;

2. Compositional art competition among artists amid global fascism and the colonial complexities of twentieth-century East Asia by Dr Amanda Hsieh; and

3. Dance and spatial notation as a tracing of gestures, movements, and marks on surfaces to examine dancers’ mobility across East Asia and Europe during the 1930s by Dr Fusako Innami.

Collectively, we hope that this lecture will present diverse historical, political, and cultural traces from the twentieth century to consider how we engage with the past in our everyday contemporary lives.

Speaker Profiles

Rachel Barclay is Senior Curator at Durham University’s Oriental Museum. Having originally trained as an Egyptologist, Rachel has worked in university museums in Oxford and Durham for more than 25 years, building her knowledge of collections from across North Africa, all of Asia and New Zealand. In 2025 she was awarded the Japanese Foreign Minister’s Commendation for her contribution to promoting mutual understanding between Japan and the UK through Japanese Art.

Dr Adam Bronson is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Durham University. He is author of One Hundred Million Philosophers: Science of Thought and the Culture of Democracy in Postwar Japan. He is finalising the monograph Empire of Public Opinion: Deliberation and Representation in the History of Japanese Political Culture and Thought, 1853-1958, which explores how public opinion reflected and enabled changes to profound politics and culture in Japanese history. Research for the book has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the British Academy/Leverhulme Foundation, and the Japan Foundation.

Dr Amanda Hsieh is Associate Professor of Musicology in the Department of Music at Durham University. She is working on a monograph, The Japanese Empire’s German Art Music, 1910–1945, which argues that there was a clear connection between Western, specifically German, art music and Japanese state- and empire-building initiatives during the first half of the twentieth century. The book’s completion is supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. In 2027–2032, she will lead a €1.5 million European Research Council Starting Grant project titled ‘Singers of the Japanese Pacific: Gender, Race, and Class in the East Asian Empire’s Actor Networks, 1920s–1960s’.

Dr Fusako Innami is Associate Professor in Japanese and Performance Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University, as well as the author of Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan (2021). The book has been recognised as the runner-up for the British Comparative Literature Association’s First Book Prize 2025. Fusako conducts movement workshops, ‘Touch’, to translate literary touch back to bodies, and an international project, ‘Translating Embodiedness’, to develop methodologies for translating embodied practices across media. She is completing a monograph, Dancing Traces: Performance, Topography, Gestural Writing, supported by the British Academy and the US-UK Fulbright Commission.

Booking Essential | Admission Free