Sarah Frederick

Sarah Frederick’s areas of specialization are in 20th-century Japanese literature and history and relationships among mass media, modern literature, gender, and culture. She has worked extensively on 1920s and 30s women’s print culture culture, image and text in literature of the 1930s-1950s, and gender and sexuality in modern literature and culture. She teaches courses in all periods of Japanese literature, film, and popular culture, as well as comparative courses on topics such as melodrama as a genre in fiction and cinema. She has received fellowships from the NEH, Fulbright-Hays, Javits, Hakuho Foundation, and Japanese Ministry of Education for her research.

Professor Frederick is the author of Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women’s Magazines in Interwar Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2006), and articles in positions: East Asian Cultures Critique, US Japan Women’s Journal and Japan Forum. She was also a contributor to Bad Girls of Japan, Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley, eds.

Professor Frederick is currently working on a book project that looks at 20th-century Japanese literature and history through the voluminous works of Yoshiya Nobuko (1896-1973), one of modern Japan’s most commercially successful authors who is also seen as formative of many aspects of girls’ culture (shōjo culture). The project deals with materials from throughout Yoshiya’s writing life, from the 1910s to the 1970s, including her travel writings in Asia during and after the Pacific war, as well as her afterlife in popular girls’ culture, including manga and anime.

In addition to the book on Yoshiya Nobuko, Professor Frederick is also currently working on a joint Digital Humanities project with Alice Tseng (BU, History of Art and Architecture) “Mapping Kyoto” funded in part by the Hariri Institute for Computational Research and a related paper mapping Soseki’s travels in Kyoto. She is also translating Soseki’s essay about traveling to Kyoto.

She has received a BFRI (Bunka Fashion Research Institute) and MEXT Collaborative Fellowship for research on representations of kimono in literary modernism and the modernist and cosmopolitan aspects of kimono wearing and representation. She was invited to be the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies Professor in 2008-09 and Fall 2015.

She served as Acting Chair of WLL in 2010-2011 and is on the Board of the BU Center for the Study for Asia for which she has also serves as Associate Director. She is on the Executive Board of the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies of which Boston University is a member. In Fall 2015, Sarah Frederick will be KCJS Professor at the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies located at Doshisha University.

Academia.edu profile: http://bu.academia.edu/SarahFrederick