Stephanie M. Hohlios specializes in modern and contemporary art from Japan. Her research interests include performance (broadly defined); gender, sexuality, and the body; labor identity and proletarian art; regionalism; transnational identity; trauma, affect, and memory. She has taught art history courses on the global modern and contemporary; Buddhist visuality and architecture; Japan; and Asia.
Her forthcoming dissertation examines the intersection of labor, gender, and the arts in a former coal mining community in Kyushu, Japan from the Early to Late Twentieth Century. It argues that region (as shared identity and socially coded landscape) takes form through mobility: that of laborers and their families; visual artists and theater troupes; artistic styles and fashions; and political values. The arts equip regional activists to convey and question collective memory, and to negotiate a place for the region in and against national narratives of industrial modernization.
Stephanie M. Hohlios has received research travel grants and fellowships from the Center for Japanese Studies, Shinjō Itō Chair Fund, and Marian Hahn Simpson Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. As a Blakemore Freeman Fellow, she attended the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (Yokohama, Japan) from 2017 – 2018. For the 2019 – 2020 academic year she conducted dissertation research in Japan as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Research Fellow affiliated at Tokyo University of the Arts (Tōkyō Geijutsu Daigaku).
