Yuriko Furuhata
Professor; William Dawson Scholar of Cinema and Media History; Graduate Program Director and Chair, Department of East Asian Studies; Associate Member, Department of Art History and Communication Studies
I am Professor and William Dawson Scholar of Cinema and Media History in the Department of East Asian Studies and an Associate Member of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies in the Faculty of Arts. I have served as the Graduate Program Director for six years and am currently the Chair of the department.
I work in film and media studies, environmental humanities, visual arts, science and technology studies, and transpacific studies of Japan and its colonial legacies as a former empire. I am passionate about learning, making connections across disciplines and fields of knowledge, and thinking outside the box.
As a member of a visible minority, a woman, and a settler immigrant, I am acutely aware of politically complex positionalities that I occupy within and without academia. With this awareness in mind, I have striven to foster an inclusive learning, research, and work environment that invites the voices of students and colleagues from historically marginalized and underrepresented communities. I arrived at ±«ÓãÖ±²¥ in 2008, straight out of a PhD program, and was helped by many mentors at ±«ÓãÖ±²¥ and beyond. Mentorship is a crucial part of my way of giving back to the communities that have welcomed and helped me grow as an intellectual, a teacher, and a person.