I am delighted to announce that Namiko Kunimoto, Associate Professor of History of Art at OSU, will be the new Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies (CES).

 

CES came into being in Autumn 2018 as part of the newly reconfigured Humanities Institute and includes Asian American Studies, Latina/o Studies, and American Indian Studies. Kunimoto has been the Director of Asian American Studies since 2017 and will also continue in that role. In her new role as CES Director, Kunimoto will lead the collaborative and coordinated efforts of our interdisciplinary ethnic studies programs to support student success, enhance curriculum, grow diverse faculty, and extend understanding of research in interdisciplinary ethnic studies.

 

 

Kunimoto's research has centered on the shifting aesthetic and artistic landscapes of contemporary Japanese art. Her 2017 book, The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious bodies in Postwar Japanese Art was published by the University of Minnesota Press. She is currently co-editing a volume on Manga at a Crossroads. Her numerous scholarly articles and essays have examined space, disaster, dissent, heroism and subjectivity in Japanese art, but she has also examined Japanese Canadian photography of internment and the U.S. feminist art group, Guerrilla Girls. In the past six years, she has been invited to present her research at, among others, the University of Lethbridge, UCLA, University of California at Berkeley, Sophia University in Tokyo, Cincinnati Museum of Art, Johns Hopkins University. Kunimoto has been the recipient of grants from OSU Arts and Humanities, WGSS Coca Cola Critical Difference, Northeast Asia Council of Association for Asian Studies. She has also been honored with the Meiss/Mellon Author's Book Award and a Japan Foundation Research Fellowship.

 

 

In 2018, Kunimoto received the OSU Distinguished Alumni Teaching Award. She regularly teaches on Japanese Art and Architecture, Feminism and Gender Issues, Transnational Theory, Nationalism and Orientalism in Asia, Photography, Race and Representation, and Asian American Art. In Summer of 2019 she was a co-organizer of a Center for Ethnic Studies curriculum workshop on building a shared ethnic studies course.

 

 

Kunimoto has held roles in national professional organizations such as Japan Arts and Globalization and Japanese Art History Forum, as she has also served on department and university committees at OSU. She has been an invaluable mentor for several students in the History of Art, and a generous peer with colleagues in ethnic studies. As the Director of Asian American Studies, Kunimoto worked closely with colleagues in several departments and university units to sponsor programs to ensure student success at OSU, and to deepen knowledge of research in Asian American Studies. One of the highlights of last year's programming was the "No-No Boy" multimedia concert featuring Julian Saporiti and Erin Aoyama. Saporiti transformed his doctoral research at Brown University on World War II Japanese Incarceration camp survivors and his own family’s history living through the Vietnam War, into a musical multimedia presentation to reach wider audiences. Saporiti and Aoyama, whose family was  incarcerated at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, one of the 10 Japanese American concentration camps, together explored experiences that have remained largely hidden in the American consciousness.

 

 

As a member of the CES Executive Committee, Kunimoto collaborated with colleagues to host the spring 2019 "Conversation on Indigeneity, Ethnicity, and Race in Scholarship" featuring three leading scholars in ethnic studies. She has been active in guiding the work of CES, administering the CES travel grant program for students, and planning for the future. Please welcome Namiko Kunimoto as the Director of Center for Ethnic Studies!

 

-Theresa Delgadillo