Professor Jennifer Coates

School of East Asian Studies

Professor in Japanese Studies

jennifer.coates@sheffield.ac.uk

Jessop West

Full contact details

Professor Jennifer Coates
School of East Asian Studies
Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA

Profile: I am a Professor of Japanese Studies at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield. My books include Making Icons: Repetition and the Female Image in Japanese Cinema, 1945-1964 (Hong Kong University Press, 2016) and Film Viewing in Postwar Japan, 1945-1968: An Ethnographic Study (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), as well as co-edited volumes Japanese Visual Media: Politicizing the Screen (Routledge, 2021 with Ben-Ari, E.) and The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2019 with Fraser, L., and Pendleton, M.).

I am an AHRC Innovation Scholar and recipient of the 2021 Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual and Performing Arts. My wider research interests include Japanese and East Asian cinema, photography, gender studies, filmmaking, and ethnographic methods. Before joining SEAS, I studied, researched, and taught in many areas of the world: as an AHRC Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (2012), a Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian National University (2011), Assistant Professor at the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, Kyoto University (2014-2018), and Senior Lecturer in Japanese Arts, Cultures, and Heritage at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures at the University of East Anglia.

Qualifications: MA (University of Glasgow), MA (SOAS, University of London), PhD (SOAS, University of London)

Research interests: My research and teaching is situated at the intersection of Japanese Studies, Film Studies, History, History of Art, and Anthropology, and can best be characterized as Japanese Cultural Studies. My work takes an interdisciplinary approach drawing from ethnography, art history, and museum studies as well as film studies. I use Japanese language and visual communications in my research practice and dissemination, with training in research-led filmmaking which resulted in a short documentary film on postwar cinema culture (When Cinema Was King, 2018). My collaborative research and editorship includes work in the fields of memory studies, gender studies, and politics, as well as pedagogy.

I am currently working on a project titled "'Japan' Outside Japan: Celebrity, Star Persona, and Curatorship in the Transmission of Japanese Arts and Cultures" funded by the Philip Leverhulme Prize. This project explores the use of a persona studies approach for understanding the perception and consumption of Japanese cultures outside Japan. Under an AHRC Innovation Scholars award I am currently partially seconded to Takero Shimazaki Architects to undertake research on "‘Japan’ in the Built Environment."

Publications

Books

Coates J (2022) Film Viewing in Postwar Japan, 1945-1968: an Ethnographic Study. EUP.
Coates J (2017) Making Icons. Hong Kong University Press. View this article in WRRO

Edited books

(Ed.) () Japanese Visual Media. Routledge. View this article in WRRO
(Ed.) () The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture. Routledge.

Journal articles

Coates J (2022) Maiko masquerade: crafting geisha girlhood in Japan. Journal of Gender Studies.
Coates J (2022) Powers of the Real: Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan by Diane Wei Lewis. Technology and Culture, 63(3), 910-911.
Coates J, Nardy DT & Coates J (2021) Back to the Future: Imaginaries of Africa on East Asian Screens. Open Screens, 4(1).
Coates J (2019) Rethinking the Young Female Cinema Audience: Postwar Cinema-Going in Kansai, 1945-1952. U.S.-Japan Women's Journal, 54, 6-28. View this article in WRRO
Coates J (2019) Introduction: Representing Youth and Gender in Japanese Popular Culture. US-Japan Women's Journal, 54(1), 3-5. View this article in WRRO
Coates J (2019) Quietly Critical: Ten Years Japan. Frames Cinema Journal, 15. View this article in WRRO
Coates J (2019) Blurred boundaries : ethnofiction and its impact on postwar Japanese cinema. Arts, 8(1). View this article in WRRO
Mostafanezhad M, Coates J & Coates J (2018) Journeys from the east: The popular geopolitics of film motivated Chinese tourism. International Journal of Tourism Anthropology, 6(3), 219-236. View this article in WRRO
Coates J (2018) Setsuko Hara vs. the Press: The Post-war Trolling of a Wartime Icon. Frames Cinema Journal, 13. View this article in WRRO
Coates J (2018) Circular thinking: the Yamanote line on film. Japan Forum, 30(2), 224-239. View this article in WRRO
Coates J (2017) Mediating memory: Shōjo and war memory in classical narrative Japanese cinema. Cultural Studies, 32(1), 105-125. View this article in WRRO
Coates J (2017) The fragmented family on film: Kinoshita Keisuke's Nihon no Higeki (The Tragedy of Japan) (1953) and the antecedents of the contemporary fragmented family in Japan. Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, 40. View this article in WRRO
Coates J (2017) Gambling with the nation : heroines of the Japanese yakuza film, 1955–1975. Japanese Studies, 37(3), 353-369. View this article in WRRO
Coates J (2017) Socializing the audience: Going to the cinema in post-war Japan. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 14(2), 590-607. View this article in WRRO
Coates J (2016) How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Female Film Stars and the Housewife Role in Postwar Japan. U.S.-Japan Women's Journal, 50(1), 29-53.
Coates J (2014) The Shape-Shifting Diva: Yamaguchi Yoshiko and the National Body. Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 6(1), 23-38.
Coates J (2013) Victims and bystanders: Women in the Japanese war-retro film. Media, War & Conflict, 6(3), 233-248.

Chapters

Coates J (2022) Female Stardom and National Identity in Postwar Japan (pp. 316-333). Wiley
Coates J & Ben-Ari E (2022) Japanese Visual Media Politicizing the Screen Introduction, JAPANESE VISUAL MEDIA (pp. 1-12).
Coates J (2021) Politicizing the audience? Film fans’ experiences of cinema in the 1960s In Coates J (Ed.), Japanese Visual Media: Politicizing the Screen (pp. 180-200). London: Routledge.
Coates J (2021) Cultural memories of occupation in the Japanese cinema theatre, 1945-52. In Taylor J (Ed.), Visual Histories of Occupation: A Transcultural Dialogue (pp. 75-96). London: Bloomsbury Academic.
(2020) Creative Context Springer Singapore View this article in WRRO
Coates J (2020) The Yakuza Film: A Genre 'Endorsed by the People' In Phillips A & Fujiki H (Ed.), The Japanese Cinema Book (pp. 348-360). London: British Film Institute. View this article in WRRO
Coates J (2020) Bodies in the Dark: The Postwar Cinema Audience and the Body as ‘Ground Zero’ In Holca I & SĂPUNARU TĂMAŞ C (Ed.), Forms of the Body in Contemporary Japanese Society, Literature, and Culture (pp. 237-257). Lexington View this article in WRRO
Coates J (2020) Creativity at the Margins in the ‘Golden Age’ of Japanese Cinema (1945–1965), Creative Context (pp. 101-117). Springer Singapore
Coates J, Fraser L & Pendleton M (2020) Gender and culture in Japan today INTRODUCTION, ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO GENDER AND JAPANESE CULTURE (pp. 1-7).
Coates J, Fraser L & Pendleton M (2019) Introduction: Gender and culture in Japan today In Coates J, Fraser L & Pendleton M (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (pp. 1-7). Routledge View this article in WRRO
Coates J & Haapio-Kirk L (2019) Gender in digital technologies and cultures In Coates J, Pendleton M & Fraser L (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (pp. 240-250). Routledge View this article in WRRO
Coates J (2019) The Making of an Auteur: The Early Films (1958-1959), Killers, Clients and Kindred Spirits: The Taboo Cinema of Shohei Imamura (pp. 21-40). Edinburgh University Press View this article in WRRO
Coates J (2018) Alternative Viewership Practices in Kyoto, Japan, The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema (pp. 221-241). Palgrave Macmillan, London
Coates J & ジェニファー　コーツ）（ (2016) 時を超えて出会いは再び訪れる:李香蘭／山口淑子／シャーリー・ヤマグチ In Wada I & Katsura K (Ed.), 他者との邂逅は何をもたらすのか: 「異文化接触」を再考する (pp. 18-48). Showado
Coates J (2015) Pleasures of Recognition and Mediation in the Spectacle of the Nation In Drummond P (Ed.), The London Film and Media Reader 3: The Pleasures of the Spectacle The London Symposium

Book reviews

Coates J (2019) Promiscuous Media: Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926–1945 by Hikari Hori. The Journal of Japanese Studies, 45(2), 415-419. View this article in WRRO
Coates J (2014) Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility and Labor in Japan. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 15(1), 94-96.
Coates J (2012) Noriko J. Horiguchi, Women Adrift: The Literature of Japan's Imperial Body (Review). Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, 30.
Allan J (2012) Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity and Capitalism in 1990s Japan. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 13(3), 299-301.

Teaching activities: On leave until 2025.