Satoko Shimazaki

Satoko Shimazaki’s areas of research include early modern Japanese theater and popular literature; the modern history of kabuki; gender representation on the kabuki stage; sound and visual media; and the interaction of performance, print, and text. Her first book, Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost (Columbia University Press, 2016), which was awarded the John Whitney Hall Book Prize and honorable mention for the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theater History, explored kabuki as a key player in the formation of an urban identity in early modern Japan, along with the modern textualization of the art as it was pressed into service as a guarantor of national identity. She is currently working on two book projects: Kabuki Actors, Print Technology, and the Theatrical Origins of Modern Media, which explores the continuities and ruptures that link early modern books and prints as conduits of bodily knowledge, voices, and sounds to the age of mechanical recording and moveable type; and Kabuki in Print: Sukeroku in Theatrical Ephemera, a pedagogical guide to the rich world of kabuki theater ephemera, including playbills, actor critiques, illustrated digests. She will be on research leave during 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 with the support of the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment of the Humanities.

Before moving to UCLA in 2019, Satoko Shimazaki was associate professor at the University of Southern California. She has also taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and currently has a joint appointment as associate professor at Waseda University in Tokyo.