Dr. Anne Sokolsky

Contact Information

Office: Sturges 213
Phone: 740-368-3572
E-mail: aesokols@owu.edu

Specialty

Japanese Literature, and Gender Studies, other interests include: Chinese and Taiwanese Literature, Asian-American Literature, East Asian Film, and Arab Women Writers

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
M.Ed., Harvard University
B.A., University of Michigan

Biography

Dr. Sokolsky received her Ph.D. in Modern Japanese Literature with a sub-specialty in Gender Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. She is currently working on a literary biography of Tamura Toshiko, one of Japan’s early modern feminist writers who spent two decades living in North America in the 1920s and 1930s. Her research on Tamura has appeared in Japanese and English journals. Dr. Sokolsky’s other research projects include an examination of the literary production of Issei and Nisei (first and second generation Japanese American) immigrants that appeared in the literary columns of Japanese American immigrant newspapers in Los Angeles and elsewhere. She is also working on translating Taiwanese literature written in Japanese during Japan’s colonization of Taiwan. She has presented her research at conferences in Japan and the United States.

Dr. Sokolsky has had extensive experience teaching in the United States and abroad. She has taught about Asian literature and culture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Santa Barbara, and she was an English teacher in the Japan Exchange of Teaching Program from 1989 - 1990. She was also a Fulbright scholar in Japan from 2001 to 2002. In addition to living in Japan for eight years, Dr. Sokolsky spent two years in Morocco, where she was a Peace Corps volunteer. While in Morocco, she learned Moroccan Arabic and then continued studying Arabic at Harvard University, where she received a M.Ed. in International Education and Development.

For fun, she plays the cello and studies Chinese.

Courses Taught

HMCL 124, Love and Sexuality in East Asian Literature and the Arts
HMCL 127, Myth, Legend, and Folklore of the Non-Western Tradition
HMCL 190.5, Bad Girls: The Making of the Femme Fatale in Japanese Literature, Film and Culture
HMCL 226, Gender and Identity
HMCL 265, Freedom and Constraint
HMCL 300.5, East Asian Film
HMCL 300.4, Great Books of Asia
HMCL 375, Postmodern World Literatures
HMCL 499, Senior Seminar: Geisha, Belly Dancers, and Dragon Ladies – Debunking the Myths of Orientalism

Major Publications

“Tamura Toshiko.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, Oxford University Press, 2008.

“Writing between the Spaces of Nation and Culture: Tamura Toshiko’s 1930s Fiction about Japanese Immigrants.” U.S. Japan Women’s Journal, no. 28, 2005, 76 – 108.

“No Place to Call Home: Negotiating the ‘Third Space’ for Returned Japanese Americans in Tamura Toshiko’s ‘Bubetsu’(Scorn).” The Japan Review, March 2005, vol. 17, pp. 121 - 148.

“Writing the Political, Not Just the Personal in Tamura Toshiko’s Shôwa Period Fiction.” The Proceedings for the Association of Japanese Literary Studies. UCLA. Spring 2005.

“After ‘The New Woman:’ Issues of Gender and Race in the Works of Tamura Toshiko from the 1910s to the 1930s” 「新しい女」とその後：田村俊子一九一〇年代作品と一九三〇年代作品におけるジェンダーと人種, The Regions of Translation: Culture, Colonialism, and Identity 翻訳の圏域：文化、植民地、アイデンティティ. Tsukuba: Tsukuba University Comparative Literature Research Group 筑波大学文化批評研究会, 2004, pp. 265 – 285.

“Miyamoto Yuriko and Socialist Writers.” The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 164 - 169.

* Note: You will need the free Adobe Reader software to view/print PDF files. Click the “Get Adobe Reader” icon to begin the download process.