Michael Foster « Faculty

Associate Professor, EALC
Associate Professor, Folklore

fosterm indiana.edu
506 North Fess, Room 202
(812) 855-0395

Education

Stanford University, Ph.D., 2003
University of California, Berkeley, MA, 1995

Research Interests

Japanese Folklore, Literature, Film
Festival / Ritual
Tourism
Supernatural Theory

Courses Recently Taught

F101: Introduction to Folklore
F600: Folkloristics in Japan
F755: Tourism: Authenticity and Nostalgia

Select Awards and Distinctions

2011-12 Fulbright Fellowship
2010-11 Indiana University Outstanding Junior Faculty Award
2010-11 Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award
2009-10 Indiana University College Arts and Humanities Institute (CAHI) Travel Research Grant
2009 Chicago Folklore Prize
2009: Northeast Asia Council (NEAC) of Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Short-term Travel to Japan for Professional Purposes
2006-08: Stanford University Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship in Japanese Studies
2001-02: Stanford Humanities Center, Geballe Dissertation Fellowship
1999-2001: Fulbright Fellowship (Graduate Research Fellow)
1995-96: Blakemore Foundation Fellowship

Publication Highlights

“Early Modern Past to Post-Modern Future: Changing Discourses of Japanese Monsters.” In Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Ed. Asa
Mittman and Peter Dendle, pp. 133-150. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2012.
“The UNESCO Effect: Confidence, Defamiliarization, and a New Element in the Discourse on a Japanese Island.” Journal of Folklore Research 48, no. 1 (2011): 63-107.
Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yôkai.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
“Haunted Travelogue: Hometowns, Ghost Towns, and Memories of War.” Mechademia Vol. 4: War/Time (2009): 164-181.
“What time is this picture? Cameraphones, tourism, and the digital gaze in Japan.”
Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture Vol. 15, Issue 3 (May 2009): 351-372.
“The Otherworlds of Mizuki Shigeru.” Mechademia Vol. 3: Limits of the Human (2008): 8-28.
“Observing Ritual: Namahage, Toshidon, and the Tourist Gaze.” Proceedings of the
Association for Japanese Literary Studies, vol. 8 (Summer 2007): 479-488.
“The Question of the Slit-Mouthed Woman: Contemporary Legend, the Beauty Industry, and Women’s Weekly Magazines in Japan.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 32, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 699-726.
“Strange Games and Enchanted Science: The Mystery of Kokkuri.” The Journal of Asian Studies 65: 2 (May 2006): 251-275.
“Walking in the City with Natsume Sôseki: The Metaphorical Landscape in ‘Koto no
sorane.’” Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies,vol. 6 (Summer
2005): 137-146.
“Yôkai no kyôiku [The education of monsters].” Kai, vol. 15 (August 2003): 292-5.
“Konchû no yôkaigaku [The demonology of insects].” Kai, vol. 14 (March 2003): 258-9.

I came to IU in 2008 after several years in the Department of Comparative Literature & Foreign Languages at the University of California, Riverside, where I taught Japanese language, literature, folklore and film.

My research focuses on folklore, literature, film and popular culture, primarily in Japan. My first book, Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yôkai, traces how notions of the mysterious and monstrous are articulated both in academic discourses and popular practices from the seventeenth century through the present. I am particularly interested in how those aspects of everyday life that we often take for granted—games, rumors, popular beliefs—reflect broader cultural and historical changes. In this work I focus on conceptions of the "supernatural" to explore representations of the weird (both corporeal and otherwise), the transcendence of normative classification systems, and the many modes by which humans attempt to articulate the inexpressible.

Currently I am working on a new project, titled Visiting Strangers: Tourists, Ethnographers, and Gods, in which I explore the relationship of tourism, ethnography and festival/ritual in Japan. For this project, I am pursuing field research on the Namahage festival in Akita Prefecture and the Toshidon in Kagoshima Prefecture, and will also consider the ethnographic and theoretical observations of Yanagita Kunio, Orikuchi Shinobu, Komatsu Kazuhiko and other folklorists.