Dr. Jakobina Arch is an Associate Professor of History at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Her research focuses on marine environmental history in Japan, especially in the early modern period. Her first book, Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan, examines the role of the marine environment by focusing on the many roles of whales in Tokugawa society and culture. Her current work focuses on coastal sailors and ships in early modern Japan.

Dr. Moerman is a professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College. He is Co-Chair of the Columbia University Seminar in Buddhist Studies and an Associate Director of the Columbia Center for Buddhism and Asian Religions. His research interests are in the visual and material culture of Japanese religions. His new book, The Japanese Buddhist World Map: Relious Vision and the Cartographic Imagination (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021), explores the largely unknown archive of Japanese Buddhist world maps and analyzes their production, reproduction, and reception.

Dr. Toyosawa is a research fellow at the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. She is interested in exploring processes, structures, and systems that enable production of knowledge and interpretation of culture to understand the ways our reality is produced. Her research seeks to identify the past in the present and the implications of such discoveries as a means for political and social critique.

Dr. Buhrman is a historian of Japanese religions, specializing in the pre-modern period (before 1600). Her research investigates how individuals saw and articulated their understanding of their place in the universe, and how this influenced their actions, particularly to ensure safety. In particular, she has focused on Onmyōdō and Sukuyōdō. Her book manuscript, The Rule of Time, focuses on the astronomical, cosmological, and political forces that shaped debates about the calendar in Japan’s seventh through twelfth centuries.

Dr. Pitelka is a professor of History and Asian Studies and Chair of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a specialist in the history of late medieval and early modern Japan, with a focus on the samurai, tea culture, ceramics, cities, and material culture. He recently published Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and 

Letters from Japan’s Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Correspondence of Warlords, Tea, Masters, Zen Priests, and Aristocrats (University of California, Berkeley, 2021).

Dr. Smith is an assistant professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Florida. His research interests include postwar Japanese literature, Edo-period Japanese literature, Japanese popular culture and visual culture, as well as postmodern theory.

Dr. Yamamoto is an associate professor at the National Institute of Japanese Literature in Japan. He researches about Edo- and Meiji-peiord (17th- to 19th-century) Japanese literature and cultural history, with a focus on Literary Sinitic prose and poetry (kanshibun). His recent book Shibun to keisei: bakufu jushin no jūhasseiki 詩文と経世：幕府儒臣の十八世紀 (Nagoya University Press, 2021) explores the intersection of kanshi poetry and politics of the eighteenth century in Japan.