This interdisciplinary roundtable focusing on Japan explores how essentialist or culturalist arguments are mobilized in research and teaching contexts by interlocutors, other academics, and students, and how to respond as scholars and instructors.

I have organized an exciting roundtable at the 2023 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion that will be co-sponsored by the Japanese Religions Unit; The Asian North American Religion, Culture, and Society Unit; the New Religious Movements Unit; and the Esotericism Unit.

I will be speaking as part of a roundtable celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of an influential book co-authored by my MA thesis advisor, George J. Tanabe, Jr.

I’ll appear on a roundtable hosted by the Society for the Study of Japanese Religions at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion

I’ll be speaking on a roundtable about furthering mutual understanding between the US and Japan.

I’ll be speaking on a roundtable about Peter Coviello’s Make Yourselves Gods

I’ll be visiting UNC-Charlotte to talk anime with Kaitlyn Ugoretz of UCSB.

I will be serving as moderator for a plenary panel on race and racism in Asian Studies at the AAS annual meeting.

I’ll be speaking on a presidential panel for the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. The panel is titled “Global Asias: Undisciplining as an Emergent Field.”

My coauthors and I will virtually travel to Princeton to discuss our article “Why Scholars of Religion Must Investigate the Corporate Form.”

I’ll be virtually visiting Stanford University to join a roundtable on Race and Gender in the Contemporary Study of Religion.

This panel addresses relationship between religious liberty, national identity, and the category of religion, as described in two University of Chicago Press books from 2019: Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan and Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism and the Redefinition of Democracy.

I will talk about debunking as pedagogy, focusing on competing didactic approaches to debunking taken by bureaucrats, scholars, clerics, and journalists during the Allied Occupation of Japan and in its immediate aftermath (roughly 1945–1960). Others will cover Herman Melville novels, Joseph Smith’s golden plates, the social sciences in Cold War America, debunking and the figure of the spoilsport, and televised spirit possession.