The View from Ground Zero: Teaching the Bomb through Literature
The View from Ground Zero: Teaching the Bomb through Literature
A NCTA Workshop for K-12 Educators
February 21, 2023
7:00 - 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time
If you have any questions, please contact Shawn Bender at benders@dickinson.edu
Learn more about our presenters
Alex Bates, Associate Professor of Japanese Language and Literature, Dickinson College
Professor Bates is a specialist in modern Japanese literature and film. In addition to survey courses in these areas, he has taught courses in Japanese youth culture, war in fiction and film, ecocriticism, East Asian film, and cinematic adaptations of Japanese literature. Professor Bates's book on representations of the 1923 earthquake that destroyed Tokyo was published by the University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies Press in 2015. His research in this area has continued into other natural disasters in modern Japanese culture, including Japan's 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster. Other research interests include ecocriticism, urban modernism, and early post-war Japanese literature and film.
Shawn Bender, Associate Professor East Asian Studies and Anthropology/Archaeology, Dickinson College
Professor Bender earned his doctorate in cultural anthropology at the University of California, San Diego in 2003. At Dickinson he teaches courses on contemporary Japanese society, popular culture, music, demographic change, health and aging, and technology. Since the late 1990s, Prof. Bender has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with taiko drumming groups in Japan. This scholarship is the basis of his book entitled Taiko Boom: Japanese Drumming in Place and Motion (2012, UC Press). He has also examined the introduction of traditional musical instruments in primary and secondary school curricula in Japan. More recently, his research has focused on the connections among discourses of demographic crisis, changes in elder care, and the development of robotics in Japan and Europe. This work has taken him both to Japan and to Denmark (where some Japanese robotics technologies have found a home). Prof. Bender is also affiliated with the department of Anthropology at Dickinson and the Health Studies Certificate Program. He has received numerous research grants from such institutions as the Japan Foundation and the Japanese Ministry of Education. His publications have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies and in Social Science Japan Journal.
Rachael Hutchinson is Associate Professor in Japanese Studies at the University of Delaware. She received her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2000, and her research addresses representations of Japanese identity in a range of narrative texts – literature, film, manga and videogames. Her major publications are Japanese Culture Through Videogames (Routledge, 2019), Nagai Kafū’s Occidentalism: Defining the Japanese Self (author, SUNY Press 2011), Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature (co-editor, Routledge 2007) and Negotiating Censorship in Modern Japan (editor, Routledge 2013). She has published essays in Japan Forum, Japanese Studies, Monumenta Nipponica and Games and Culture, and is currently working on an edited volume on the Japanese role-playing game (JRPG).
Drinking Tea in Japan 
