Professor of Pre-modern Japanese Literature
rjalc@umich.eduOffice Information:
202 South Thayer Street
5127 STB
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608
phone: 734.764.2023
Japan; Visual Culture; Performance; Literature
Education/Degree:
Ph.D. Princeton University, 2007About
For the most up-to-date information, please visit: https://www.reginaldjackson.com
Research interests:
What I care about most as a teacher and scholar is the praxis of reading better: how to develop more creative, critically sensitive ways to engage texts. In this vein, my research and teaching explore legibility as a generative concept. The main venue for this inquiry is medieval Japan. My research on premodern Japanese culture traverses three fields: literature, art history, and performance studies. Specifically, I concentrate on legibility’s relation to embodiment. The tactics bodies deploy to navigate aesthetic and political constraints intrigue me, whether they occur in calligraphy or on Noh stages. Animating my research is this basic question: “How should bodies be read?” While my attempts to address the ethical, methodological, and disciplinary facets of this question plot a cursive path, all my scholarly work examines relationships between embodiment and legibility to some degree: in late-Heian handscrolls, medieval dance-drama, Afro-Asian sculpture, slide guitar, contemporary choreography, and The Tale of Genji. Queer theory, performance theory, critical race theory, and phenomenological approaches feel most helpful for my research at present.
Current projects:
My scholarship focuses on questions of performance and performativity within Japanese culture. My first book, Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls (University of Michigan Press, 2018), theorizes calligraphic performance to examine how dying and reading intersect across Genji's 12th and 21st-century scroll renditions.
My second book, A Proximate Remove: Queering Intimacy and Loss in The Tale of Genji (University of California Press, 2021), explores the potentials and limitations of queer theory to consider scenes in Genji where dominant modes of interacting with the phenomenal world are interrupted, reoriented, and reworked—beyond questions of sexuality. Two other book manuscripts are in progress: Yasuko Yokoshi: Choreographic Translation Beyond Japanese Culture, and another that explores the relation between slavery and performance in premodern Japan.
As an outgrowth of my research on slavery, racism, and performance in a Japanese context, I created the Japanese Studies and Antiracist Pedagogy project (JSAP). The JSAP project, which centers BIPOC graduate students and faculty as key partners, is designed to develop a forum for discussing and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion within the field of Japanese Studies. The project’s aim is to enhance awareness and quality of teaching related to DEI issues within Japanese Studies, with an explicit emphasis on antiracist pedagogy as the basis for public-facing humanities research and professional development. Our lecture series, graduate workshop, and podcast series provides resources for engagement and learning at multiple levels.
In addition to this work, I maintain a deep investment in teaching and studying Noh drama. In the past years I’ve turned my attention back to writing about it in earnest in pieces like “Frayed Fabrications: Feminine Mobility, Surrogate Bodies, and Robe Usage in Noh Drama” (Theatre Survey, 2019), and “Desiring Spectacular Discipline: Aspiration, Fraternal Anxiety, and the Allure of Restraint in Nō’s Dōjōji” (Asian Theatre Journal, 2019).
Beyond these writing projects, I am also committed to improving the study of Japanese performance and premodern Japanese culture, in particular. In addition to organizing events like the trans-disciplinary workshop, "Rethinking Premodern Japan: Territory, Embodiment, Exposure" (2015), I have also recently designed a program called the Japanese Performance Theory Workshop (JPTW) (summer 2017): https://jptw.asian.lsa.umich.edu. Through seminar-style discussions, performance analysis exercises, and writing critiques, this intensive summer workshop helped participants working on Japanese performance at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels develop better conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical tools.
Teaching interests:
As a confessed method junkie, I’m always trying to map out how systems work—be they passages of Heian prose, Noh exorcisms, or networks of evangelization and enslavement. My reading, writing, and teaching develop recursively as I test approaches, then pivot to retool them. Discussions with thoughtful students fuel this process, sparking experimentation on the page and in the classroom. My teaching aims to make students more skilled at critical thinking, more aware of deeper truths, and more confident in making conceptual and historical links between texts in ways attuned to their own experiences.
I teach a range of undergraduate and graduate courses. These include “Antiracism and Japanese Culture,” “Japanese Performance Culture,” “Noh Drama,” “Performance/Theory/East Asia,” “Bodies and Boundaries in Premodern Japan,” “Critical Introduction to Asian Studies,” “Love and Death in Japanese Culture,” “Apprehending Gesture in Japanese and African-American Performance,” and the “Japanese Narrative Design Lab,” a practice-based class on visual storytelling techniques in which students learn to analyze Japanese narratives and draw from them—quite literally—to craft their own tales. This course allows me to indulge and expand a commitment to drawing and visual storytelling. To check out these experiments, feel free to visit https://www.rjacksonartwork.com/.
On a final note, let me say that long before tenure was earned, my first loves were illustration and guitar. I believe these skills of visual storytelling and composing music energize how I approach intellectual problems encountered today in disparate sectors. In other words, if I’m any good at interpreting handscrolls or sketching kabuki clashes, blame that metric ton of comics in my mother’s basement; it anchored doctoral training to a degree I can only appreciate in retrospect. Why mention this? For at least two reasons: to affirm imaginative instincts institutionalized rubrics of excellence and expertise devalue; and to encourage students to make their individual skills and creative intuition the basis of whatever style of inquiry they pursue. Students interested in talking shop or pursuing graduate studies here or elsewhere are welcome to contact me.
Selected Publications:
A Proximate Remove: Queering Intimacy and Loss in The Tale of Genji (University of California Press, 2021)
Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls (University of Michigan Press, 2018)
“Frayed Fabrications: Feminine Mobility, Surrogate Bodies, and Robe Usage in Noh Drama” (Theatre Survey, 2019)
“Gallows Hospitality: Visiting Hangman Takuzō’s Garden Theater” (TDR: The Drama Review, 2018)
“Homosocial Mentorship and the Serviceable Female Corpse: Manhood Rituals in The Tale of Genji” (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2017)
About
For the most up-to-date information, please visit: https://www.reginaldjackson.com
Research interests:
What I care about most as a teacher and scholar is the praxis of reading better: how to develop more creative, critically sensitive ways to engage texts. In this vein, my research and teaching explore legibility as a generative concept. The main venue for this inquiry is medieval Japan. My research on premodern Japanese culture traverses three fields: literature, art history, and performance studies. Specifically, I concentrate on legibility’s relation to embodiment. The tactics bodies deploy to navigate aesthetic and political constraints intrigue me, whether they occur in calligraphy or on Noh stages. Animating my research is this basic question: “How should bodies be read?” While my attempts to address the ethical, methodological, and disciplinary facets of this question plot a cursive path, all my scholarly work examines relationships between embodiment and legibility to some degree: in late-Heian handscrolls, medieval dance-drama, Afro-Asian sculpture, slide guitar, contemporary choreography, and The Tale of Genji. Queer theory, performance theory, critical race theory, and phenomenological approaches feel most helpful for my research at present.
Current projects:
My scholarship focuses on questions of performance and performativity within Japanese culture. My first book, Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls (University of Michigan Press, 2018), theorizes calligraphic performance to examine how dying and reading intersect across Genji's 12th and 21st-century scroll renditions.
My second book, A Proximate Remove: Queering Intimacy and Loss in The Tale of Genji (University of California Press, 2021), explores the potentials and limitations of queer theory to consider scenes in Genji where dominant modes of interacting with the phenomenal world are interrupted, reoriented, and reworked—beyond questions of sexuality. Two other book manuscripts are in progress: Yasuko Yokoshi: Choreographic Translation Beyond Japanese Culture, and another that explores the relation between slavery and performance in premodern Japan.
As an outgrowth of my research on slavery, racism, and performance in a Japanese context, I created the Japanese Studies and Antiracist Pedagogy project (JSAP). The JSAP project, which centers BIPOC graduate students and faculty as key partners, is designed to develop a forum for discussing and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion within the field of Japanese Studies. The project’s aim is to enhance awareness and quality of teaching related to DEI issues within Japanese Studies, with an explicit emphasis on antiracist pedagogy as the basis for public-facing humanities research and professional development. Our lecture series, graduate workshop, and podcast series provides resources for engagement and learning at multiple levels.
In addition to this work, I maintain a deep investment in teaching and studying Noh drama. In the past years I’ve turned my attention back to writing about it in earnest in pieces like “Frayed Fabrications: Feminine Mobility, Surrogate Bodies, and Robe Usage in Noh Drama” (Theatre Survey, 2019), and “Desiring Spectacular Discipline: Aspiration, Fraternal Anxiety, and the Allure of Restraint in Nō’s Dōjōji” (Asian Theatre Journal, 2019).
Beyond these writing projects, I am also committed to improving the study of Japanese performance and premodern Japanese culture, in particular. In addition to organizing events like the trans-disciplinary workshop, "Rethinking Premodern Japan: Territory, Embodiment, Exposure" (2015), I have also recently designed a program called the Japanese Performance Theory Workshop (JPTW) (summer 2017): https://jptw.asian.lsa.umich.edu. Through seminar-style discussions, performance analysis exercises, and writing critiques, this intensive summer workshop helped participants working on Japanese performance at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels develop better conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical tools.
Teaching interests:
As a confessed method junkie, I’m always trying to map out how systems work—be they passages of Heian prose, Noh exorcisms, or networks of evangelization and enslavement. My reading, writing, and teaching develop recursively as I test approaches, then pivot to retool them. Discussions with thoughtful students fuel this process, sparking experimentation on the page and in the classroom. My teaching aims to make students more skilled at critical thinking, more aware of deeper truths, and more confident in making conceptual and historical links between texts in ways attuned to their own experiences.
I teach a range of undergraduate and graduate courses. These include “Antiracism and Japanese Culture,” “Japanese Performance Culture,” “Noh Drama,” “Performance/Theory/East Asia,” “Bodies and Boundaries in Premodern Japan,” “Critical Introduction to Asian Studies,” “Love and Death in Japanese Culture,” “Apprehending Gesture in Japanese and African-American Performance,” and the “Japanese Narrative Design Lab,” a practice-based class on visual storytelling techniques in which students learn to analyze Japanese narratives and draw from them—quite literally—to craft their own tales. This course allows me to indulge and expand a commitment to drawing and visual storytelling. To check out these experiments, feel free to visit https://www.rjacksonartwork.com/.
On a final note, let me say that long before tenure was earned, my first loves were illustration and guitar. I believe these skills of visual storytelling and composing music energize how I approach intellectual problems encountered today in disparate sectors. In other words, if I’m any good at interpreting handscrolls or sketching kabuki clashes, blame that metric ton of comics in my mother’s basement; it anchored doctoral training to a degree I can only appreciate in retrospect. Why mention this? For at least two reasons: to affirm imaginative instincts institutionalized rubrics of excellence and expertise devalue; and to encourage students to make their individual skills and creative intuition the basis of whatever style of inquiry they pursue. Students interested in talking shop or pursuing graduate studies here or elsewhere are welcome to contact me.
Selected Publications:
A Proximate Remove: Queering Intimacy and Loss in The Tale of Genji (University of California Press, 2021)
Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls (University of Michigan Press, 2018)
“Frayed Fabrications: Feminine Mobility, Surrogate Bodies, and Robe Usage in Noh Drama” (Theatre Survey, 2019)
“Gallows Hospitality: Visiting Hangman Takuzō’s Garden Theater” (TDR: The Drama Review, 2018)
“Homosocial Mentorship and the Serviceable Female Corpse: Manhood Rituals in The Tale of Genji” (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2017)
