Japanese Alumni Stories

Lani Alden received her M.A. in Japanese from CU Boulder in 2018 and wrote her Master's thesis on the development of the conceptualization of the onnagata, as it relates to gender performance and performativity, across time. During this time, she also completed a Graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at the University of California at Berkeley. Her most recent research utilizes queer theory and posthumanism and is focused around the kabuki theatre of the late Edo period.

  lani_alden@berkeley.edu

Brad BREITEN received his MA in the Asian Languages and Civilizations Department in 2016, having completing a thesis under Professor Janice Brown, entitled "The Butoh Body Performed: Aesthetic and embodiment in butoh dance." His research included movement, phenomenology of dance, Japanese avant-garde performance and Japanese traditional performance. Breiten is currently employed as an Assistant Language Teacher with the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program in Iwamizawa-shi, Hokkaido, Japan. Through this program, he teaches at three different schools: two elementary schools and one junior-high school. As the ALT for a junior-high school Breiten is responsible for helping Japanese Teachers of English (JTE) in executing their lesson plans and assisting with pronunciation and listening practice both in and out of the classroom. At the elementary level his schools have no JTEs and he is responsible for all lesson planning, teaching, and class management. Many of the skills Breiten developed as a graduate teacher and departmental lead at CU Boulder serve him well as an ALT on the JET program, and the training he received to get the Graduate Teacher Program Certificate in College Teaching has been invaluable, not only as a teacher and member of school faculty, but as a member of the community as a whole.

  jonathan.breiten@colorado.edu

William BRYANT received his MA in Japanese from CU Boulder in 2014. His research focuses on setsuwa literature, particularly that of the late Heian period. He has a forthcoming collaborative translation with ALC’s Keller Kimbrough of Tamamizu monogatari, a sixteenth century story, slated to be published in 2018. Since leaving CU, William has worked as a historical research assistant and is currently a freelance translator.

  william.bryant@colorado.edu

  chime025@umn.edu
  website​

Brendan Craine received his M.A. in Japanese Literature from the department in 2017 as a graduate of the Bachelor’s-Accelerated Master's (BAM) degree program. His studies were focused primarily on modern Japanese language and translation. As an undergraduate, his personal essay A Cicada Shell/It Sang Itself/Utterly Away was selected for multiple awards, including the national Norman Mailer Four-Year College Writing Award (beating out submissions from Stanford and Yale). After graduating, Brendan pursued additional language study at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Studies in Yokohama and is currently the head editor and translation coordinator at Export Japan, a web marketing and content creation firm based in Osaka. Since 2018, he has written or edited over 750 expository texts on a variety of subjects relating to Japanese religious, cultural, and natural history as part of an ongoing project operated by the Japan Tourism Agency.

Raechel DUMAS (Ph.D in Japanese, University of Colorado at Boulder) is Assistant Professor of Humanities at San Diego State University. She specializes in the gender politics of contemporary Japanese popular culture, with emphasis on female monstrosity in the trans-media imagination. Her other areas of research include horror television and film, animal studies, video gaming, and trauma narratives in a global context. Dr. Dumas is author of The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Popular Culture, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Science Fiction Studies, Supernatural Studies, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, and South Atlantic Review.

  rdumas@sdsu.edu

Charlie GOODWIN graduated with an MA in Japanese literature from CU, and stayed to teach Beginning Japanese as an Assistant Language Instructor for two years after that. A published fiction writer, Charlie now lives in Vienna, Austria, and often travels to Japan to write.

  charlie.goodwin@colorado.edu

Ben GRAFSTRÖM received his MA from the Asian Languages and Civilizations Department in 2009. He focused on Japanese literature and completed a thesis under the guidance of Professor R. Keller Kimbrough on the topic of kōwakamai, a narrative performance genre popular from the late Muromachi period to the early Edo period. As kōwakamai narratives are largely based on war tales, Grafström chose three pieces featuring the warrior Minamoto no Yoshitsune and his loyal retainer Saitō Musashibō Benkei as the focus of his thesis. During his time at CU he worked as a graduate assistant for the Center for Asian Studies developing educational outreach lessons for the Program for Teaching East Asia (TEA). He is currently an Assistant Professor at Akita University (Japan).

  grafstrom@akita-university.com

After obtaining a Master’s degree in Japanese literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Leah JUSTIN-JINICH entered the PhD program in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University in 2016. Her dissertation explores the complex social ties between the poet and author Ōta Nanpo (1749–1823) and four artists of the commercial ukiyo-e school of painting and print-making by examining the inscribed paintings that they created together.

   ljustinjinich@g.harvard.edu

Drew KORSCHUN received his M.A. in Japanese from CU Boulder in 2019. After stints as a Fulbright English teaching assistant in Mongolia and teaching Korean language in a Texas high school, he is currently a Ph.D. student in the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at the University of California at Berkeley. He plans to focus on the literary production of the Japanese Empire, especially early twentieth-century writing from Japan, Korea, and Northeast China. In particular, he hopes to investigate how Japanese and ethnically othered writers inscribe disability and queerness into their texts to reinforce or undermine the colonial state’s narratives of capitalism, heteropatriarchal control, and ‘productive' citizenry.

   drewkorschun@berkeley.edu

Danielle Rocheleau SALAZ is the Executive Director of the CU Center for Asian Studies. During graduate school, Danielle spent the 1998-99 school year at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama. Upon returning to Colorado, she accepted a full-time job at the newly-opened Consulate General of Japan in Denver, where she worked for six years as the Assistant to the Consul General. She completed her MA in Japanese Language and Civilization in 2000. Since 2005, Danielle has been back at CU helping to promote Asian studies across campus through grant writing and CAS programming. She began an annual summer internship program in Japan for CU students in 2016.

  salaz@colorado.edu

Hisako SCHIBLI received her MA in Japanese in 2010, having completed a thesis under Professor Laurel Rodd on the topic of teaching particles to young heritage learners of Japanese. She taught at Metropolitan State University of Denver and Red Rocks Community College before joining CU as a lecturer in 2015. She became an instructor in Fall 2018. She is also concurrently Director of the Japanese Academy of the Rockies, which provides unique experiences for children through adults to help them learn, maintain and develop Japanese language skills.

  hisako.schibli@colorado.edu

Having successfully graduated with her MA in Japanese Literature, Raisa has gone on to a PhD at UCLA, where she is studying maps, space, and premodern poetry.

  raisastebbins@g.ucla.edu

Eric SIERCKS (MA CU Boulder, 2015) is currently a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles. While at CU Boulder, he focused on contemporary Japanese literature and non-native Japanese authors. Currently, he specializes in postwar Japanese literature and intellectual history. His dissertation explores theories of nationalism and national literature in the immediate postwar period, 1946-1955. His archival research focuses on locally and independently produced literary journals from Japan’s rural periphery.  

  esiercks@ucla.edu

Tanya TOPOLIAN received her Dual MA degree from the Departments of Asian Languages and Civilizations and Religious Studies at CU Boulder. Her master's thesis, completed under the supervision of Professor Terry Kleeman, focused on understanding the concept of "foreign" in late Mito scholars' writings. Tanya is currently a research student at the University of Tokyo, where she continues working on intellectual history of Early Modern Japan.

  Tetiana.Topolian@colorado.edu