Mari Ishida

Mari Ishida is an assistant professor of Japanese at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Wake Forest University. She received Ph.D. in Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a concentration in Modern Japanese literature and cultural studies, and taught Japanese literature, film, culture, and language as an assistant adjunct professor at UCLA. Prior to her appointment at Wake Forest, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. Mari’s research and teaching interests include Japanophone literature, film, and popular culture, gender and sexuality in Japanese culture, and colonial, postcolonial and decolonial studies. Mari is currently working on the academic monograph, which examines the function of literature in the discursive production of the multiethnic ideologies in the Japanese Empire from the 1920s to the 1940s. By looking at literary works by Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese writers writing in Japanese, her work traces how literature in the Japanese empire generates, maintains, and challenges the processes and effects of racialization and thereby takes part in the continuous reproduction of the imperialist worldview.