UWM, in partnership with the Asian Studies Association and the Northeast Asia Council, hosted NEAC Distinguished Speaker, Dr. Jennifer Robertson, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. Dr. Robertson delivered a fascinating lecture entitled “Robo-Buddhism: Mind, Technology and Spirituality in Japan” to faculty, students and the external community on April 10, 2024. The event was a great success with over 50 guests in attendance. Many students from Associate Professor Aragorn Quinn’s class at UWM attended the lecture event, especially those from “Japan 355: Tales of Futures Past.” The course is a literary seminar focused on Japanese historical fiction and science fiction. The following day, Dr. Robertson visited Associate Professor Hilary Snow’s class “Honors 350: Sacred Asia” at UWM and held a roundtable discussion with students about her lecture. According to Dr. Robertson and her fellow Japanese Robo-Buddhism: Mind, Technology, and Spirituality in Japan Honors 350 and Japan 355 students Quinn and Snow, they expressed deep interest and continued to refer to her lecture in class discussions for the remainder of the semester.
About the Northeast Asia Council (NEAC) of the Association for Asian Studies
The Northeast Asia Council of the National Association for Asian Studies (NEAC) is inviting applications from American universities (Japanese Studies) and American and Canadian universities (Korean Studies) (especially those without established East Asian studies programs) to invite prominent scholars to give public lectures on campuses, either in person or online, followed by a Q&A with faculty and students.
The NEAC Distinguished Speakers Bureau was launched in 2011 and is supported by generous funding from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) and the Korea Foundation (KF).
Universities may apply to invite prominent Japanese or Korean scholars to the NEAC Distinguished Speakers Bureau.
NEAC Featured Speaker, Jennifer Robertson, Ph.D.
Jennifer Robertson is Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Anthropology, Art History, and Robotics Institute at the Penny W. Stamps College of Art and Design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (as of January 2020). She is also Visiting Professor at Tokyo College, University of Tokyo, Institute for Advanced Study (UTIAS), Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, and Visiting Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Japanese Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Robertson received his BA in Art History from the University of Hawaii in 1975, his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Hawaii in 1985 (and his MA in 1983), and his MA in Asian Studies from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1977. He was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Oriental Culture, Gakushuin University from 1978 to 1981. He has received numerous fellowships and awards, including an invited researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin (1996-1997) and a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2011-2012). Robertson has received scholarships and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Japan Institute for Frontier Studies in Social Sciences, the Abe Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, and the Ministry of Education (now the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology). As detailed in his resume, Robertson has served as visiting professor at universities in Egypt, Israel, Japan, Spain and the United States.
Robertson is the founder and editor-in-chief of the University of California Press’s (now discontinued) COLONIALISMS book series, which explores the historical realities, current significance, and future implications of imperial practices whose origins and boundaries lie outside of “the West.” Critical Asian StudiesRobertson currently serves on the editorial board of http://criticalasianstudies.org. Robertson is a regular contributor to news and non-academic media in the form of interviews, podcasts, and essays.
Robertson is a historical and visual anthropologist, historian of anthropology, and art historian whose seven books and over 90 articles and chapters cover a wide range of interdisciplinary subjects, from the 17th century to the present day. His main field of expertise is Japan, where he has lived for over 20 years, but he has also worked in Sri Lanka (1982-1992) and, since 1997, Israel. His research interests include nativism and social corrective movements, agrarianism, sexual and gender systems and ideologies, popular and mass culture, nostalgia and internationalization, urbanism, Japan in anthropology, sexuality and suicide, theatre and performance, votive and folk art, imperialism and colonialism, eugenics and bioethics, and technology and robotics. Robertson’s publications have been translated into Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. She has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on a variety of subjects, including anthropological history, theory, and methods, non-Western colonialisms, art, identity, anthropology, bioart, genetics and genealogy, human-robot interaction, image-based ethnography and visual literacy, mass and popular culture, ethnic diversity in Japan, sex, gender, sexuality, and Japanese culture and society.
Robertson lives in Seattle and currently researches, writes, and edits on the cultural history of eugenics in Japan, art, science, technology, and gender systems, elucidating “artificial intelligence” and “autonomy,” and various aspects of human-robot interaction in Japan and elsewhere. As an extension of her fieldwork and archival research on robotics, her work includes critical explorations of affective AI and embodied intimacy, and an examination of the problem of algorithmic abstraction and the attendant lack of nuance and intersectionality in AI applications. Additionally, a new Japan-based project explores birth technologies from the 1920s to the 2020s. Robertson’s most recent book is: Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation (University of California Press, 2018). A Korean version with a new preface is due to be published soon (Nulmin Books Publishers, Seoul), and a revised Japanese version is currently in the works. In addition to academic works, Biwaham creates collages, watercolors, silkscreens, ceramics, and oil paintings (www.biwahamistudio.com).
Read Dr. Robertson’s speech
The event was sponsored by the Northeast Asia Council of the Asian Studies Association, the National Resource Center Title VI Grant Program, UWM’s Center for International Education, the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, the Asian Studies Certificate Program, the Japanese Language Program, the Graduate School of Global Studies and the Department of Anthropology, the Honors College and the Japanese Cultural Association.
