Bunche Hall, rm 10383
(10th floor)
Temporal Entanglements
“How sad and cruel it is, the way we cling to what lasts like evening dew.” So laments Genji the futility of the human desire for permanence in Royall Tyler’s translation of Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th-century novel. The image of clinging to the vanishing evokes the paradoxical nature of time itself: ephemeral yet enduring, passing yet persistent, momentary yet monumental. The very survival of a work like The Tale of Genji bears testament to a series of temporal entanglements, occurring each time an iteration of the text—a critical edition, a translation, an adaptation—is produced or encountered. Indeed, the present moment is never a solitary point, but a palimpsestic fold ineluctably entwined with a multiplicity of ever-receding pasts and perpetually deferred futures. This conference offers a chance to explore temporal entanglements as a historical, representational, and conceptual phenomenon in the context of Japan.
For more and most up-to-date information, please visit: https://sites.google.com/view/2026terasaki-grad-conf/home
Schedule
| 8:30 – 9:20 am |
Registration and light breakfast
|
| 9:20 – 9:30 am |
Opening Remarks
|
| 9:30 – 10:30 am |
Keynote Address
Dr. Atsuko Ueda, Princeton University)
|
| 10:30 – 10:40 am |
Break
|
| 10:40 am – 12:00 pm |
Panel 1: Writing Alternative Temporalities
Danlin Zhang, University of Chicago
"Generation(s) of Inscription, Generation(s) of Empire—Reading “Anachronism” in Natsume Sōseki’s Sanshirō Through Inscription Technologies"
Alice Tseng, Penn State University
"(De)mobilizing National Literature: The Alternative Temporality in Kojima Nobuo’s 'The American School'"
Suong Thai, UCLA
"As Time Errs: Refugee Temporality in Japanese-repatriate and Vietnamese-refugee Fiction"
Discussant: Dr. Seiji Lippit (UCLA)
|
| 12:10 – 1:50 pm |
Lunch Break
|
| 2:00 – 2:20 pm |
Panel 2: Reenacting Spaces of Past and Present
Julia Zhou, Yale University
"Beyond Place and Time: 'Sinospheric Orientalism' and the West Lake Imagination in Akutagawa, Tanizaki, and the Xihu Jiahua (西湖佳話) Tradition"
Jiayin Yuan (University of Pennsylvania)Ray Matsumoto, UCLA
"The Eruption of the Past: Inherited Perpetrator Guilt and the Performance of Atonement in Japanese Independent Theater"
Mia Parnall, USC
"The Expo Pavilion as Healing Enclosure: Regenerative Technology and Atmospheric Empathy in Naomi Kawase’s Dialogue Theater at Expo 2025 Osaka"
Discussant: Dr. Satoko Shimazaki (UCLA)
|
| 2:20 – 2:30 pm |
Break
|
| 2:30 – 3:50 pm |
Panel 3: From Materiality to Transtemporality
Róisín Lacey-McCormac, University of Michigan
"Beyond the Procession: Material Assemblages and the Afterlives of Ritual Time in Medieval Japan"
Natalya Rodriguez, UC Santa Barbara
"Embracing the Land: Interweaving Legacies of 'Resistance by Remaining' in the Miyako Islands, Okinawa, Japan"
Eli Troen, University of Kansas
"The Japanese 'Landscape' from Korea to the Space Age: Temporal Problems in the Interpretation of Tea Bowl Aesthetics"
Discussant: Dr. Michelle Liu Carriger, UCLA
|
| 3:50 – 4:00 pm |
Break
|
| 4:00 – 5:20 pm |
Panel 4: Corporeal Poetics and Politics
Amy Wei, Cornell University
"Crip Horizons in Sagawa Chika’s Disability Poetics"
Tamane Takehara, UCLA
"Disability as Becoming in Shinjuku, Shinjuku Becoming in Disability: Rearticulating Yokota Hiroshi in Postwar Japan’s Shifting Politics of Injury"
Tabreya Ryan, Princeton University
"We Need No One Else: Liminal Spaces, Corporeal Prisons, and Osmotic Masochism in Hotel Iris"
Discussant: Yuki Nagamine, UCLA
|
| 5:30 – 5:35 pm |
Concluding Remarks
|
Organizing Committee
Alan Dai, UCLA
Yi Ren,UCLA
David Yang, UCLA
Sponsor(s): Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies
