Welcome to my website.

I was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. I currently teach Japanese literature and performance at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with ample doses of drawing and guitar pursued whenever possible.

Research Interests: 

What I care about most as a teacher and scholar is the praxis of reading better: how to develop more creative, critically sensitive ways to engage texts. Hence my research and teaching explore legibility as a pivotal concept. The main venue for this inquiry is medieval Japan. My scholarship on premodern Japanese culture traverses three fields: literature, art history, and performance studies. Specifically, I concentrate on legibility’s relation to embodiment. The tactics bodies deploy to navigate aesthetic and political constraints intrigue me, whether they occur in calligraphic prefaces or on Noh stages. My research engages this basic question: "How should bodies be read, and what are the stakes of that encounter?" While my attempts to address the ethical, methodological, and disciplinary contours of this question plot a cursive path, all my scholarly work examines relationships between embodiment and legibility to some degree: in late-Heian handscrolls, medieval dance-drama, Afro-Asian sculpture, slide guitar, contemporary choreography, and The Tale of Genji. My interests in critical theory stem from an ongoing search to apprehend rhetorical or choreographic maneuvers in more open and attentive ways. Queer studies, black feminist theory, and phenomenological approaches feel most helpful for my research at present.

Current Projects: 

My current scholarship focuses on questions of performance and performativity within Japanese culture. My first book, Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls (University of Michigan Press, 2018), theorizes calligraphic performance to examine how dying and reading intersect across Genji's 12th and 21st-century scroll renditions.

My second book, A Proximate Remove: Queering Intimacy and Loss in The Tale of Genji (University of California Press, 2021), explores the potentials and limitations of queer theory to consider intervals in Genji where dominant modes of interacting with the phenomenal world are interrupted, reoriented, or dissolved—extending beyond questions of sexuality. Two other book manuscripts are in progress: Yasuko Yokoshi: Choreography Beyond Japanese Culture; and Spectacular Dominion: Slavery, Performance, and the Boundaries of Personhood in Premodern Japan.

I maintain a deep investment in teaching and studying Noh drama. In the past few years I’ve turned my attention back to writing about it in earnest in pieces like “Frayed Fabrications: Feminine Mobility, Surrogate Bodies, and Robe Usage in Noh Drama” (Theatre Survey, 2019), and “Desiring Spectacular Discipline: Aspiration, Fraternal Anxiety, and the Allure of Restraint in Nō’s Dōjōji” (Asian Theatre Journal, 2019).

Beyond these writing projects, I am also committed to improving the study of Japanese performance and premodern Japanese culture, in particular. In addition to organizing events like the trans-disciplinary workshop, "Rethinking Premodern Japan: Territory, Embodiment, Exposure" (2015), I have also recently designed a program called the Japanese Performance Theory Workshop (JPTW) (summer 2017). Through seminar-style discussions, performance analysis exercises, and writing critiques, this intensive summer workshop helped participants working on Japanese performance at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels develop better conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical tools.

Teaching Interests: 

As a confessed method junkie, I’m always trying to map out how systems work—be they passages of Heian prose, Noh exorcisms, or networks of evangelization and enslavement. My reading, writing, and teaching develop recursively as I test approaches, then pivot to retool them. Discussions with thoughtful students fuel this process, sparking experimentation on the page and in the classroom. My teaching aims to make students more skilled at critical thinking, more aware of deeper truths, and more confident in making conceptual and historical links between texts in ways attuned to their own experiences.

I teach a range of undergraduate and graduate courses. These include

“Bodies and Boundaries in Premodern Japan,”

“Performance/Theory/East Asia,”

“Antiracism and Japanese Culture”

“Critical Introduction to Asian Studies,”

“Gender in Japanese Literary and Visual Culture,”

“Japanese Performance Culture,”

“Noh Drama,”

“Love and Death in Japanese Culture,”

“Apprehending Gesture in Japanese and African-American Performance,”

and the “Japanese Narrative Design Lab,” a practice-based class on visual storytelling techniques in which students learn to analyze Japanese narratives and draw from them—quite literally—to craft their own tales. This course allows me to indulge and expand a commitment to drawing and visual storytelling. To check out these experiments, feel free to visit https://www.rjacksonartwork.com/.

On a final note, let me say that long before tenure was earned, my first loves were illustration and guitar. I believe these skills of visual storytelling and composing music energize how I approach intellectual problems encountered today in disparate sectors. In other words, if I’m any good at interpreting handscrolls or sketching kabuki clashes, blame that metric ton of comics in my mother’s basement; it anchored doctoral training to a degree I can only appreciate in retrospect.

Why mention this? For at least two reasons: to affirm imaginative instincts institutionalized rubrics of excellence and expertise routinely devalue; and to encourage students to make their individual skills and creative intuition the basis of whatever style of inquiry they pursue.

Students interested in talking shop or pursuing graduate studies

are welcome to contact me.