Japan Studies Postdoctoral Fellow: Keisuke Yamada

Keisuke Yamada, (PhD University of Pennsylvania, 2020) is an ethnomusicologist who studies Japanese cultural formations.  As a Japanese Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh he will be affiliated with the Asian Studies Center in the University Center for International Studies from Spring 2021 through Spring 2022.  Dr. Yamada’s scholarship is interdisciplinary, ranging across a number of topics to engage with theoretical questions that highlight the significance of a global perspective in Asian studies.  His first book Supercell's Supercell featuring Hatsune Miku (Bloomsbury 2017), examined the fan-based articulation of vocaloid musical personae and the blurring of production and consumption in the domain of prosumer social media.  His dissertation research focused on the politics of cultural creativity at the intersection of traditional music, environmentalism, and human/non-human animal relationships, showing how the use of animal parts and products to make shamisen (an iconic  instrument in Japan) raises complex questions concerning ethics, aesthetics, authenticity and the integrity of musical traditions, as well as the politics of sustainability and cultural preservation in an era of global environmental activism.  Following on a critically incisive study of blackness and racial stereotypes in the intellectual history of Japan’s engagement the west, his current research examines the history of noise (sō-on), making the argument that the creative potential of noise must be understood as a feature of work environments and the history of labor in the context of industrialized production. 
While at the University of Pittsburgh Dr. Yamada will complete work on several publications, pursue his ongoing research, play a critical role in the expansion of the Summer Institute for Asian Studies, and in fall 2021 will co-teach Asia Now, an undergraduate course that incorporates a lecture series to highlight contemporary scholarship in Asian Studies.