Office: HMNSS 2508
Phone: (951) 827-1289
Fax: (951) 827-2160

michael.foster@ucr.edu

MICHAEL FOSTER
Assistant Professor, Japanese/Comparative Literature
Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures, Stanford University, 2003

Michael Dylan Foster's field of specialization is Japanese literature and cultural studies, with a particular focus on folklore and popular culture. He has published articles on folklore, early-modern literature, and contemporary popular media. His present book project traces how notions of the “supernatural” and “monsters” known as yôkai are articulated both in academic discourses and popular practices from the seventeenth century until the present. Other research interests include the development of encyclopedic and natural history discourse during the Edo period (1603-1868), pre-modern as well as contemporary urban legends, and the cultural history of hypnosis in early twentieth-century Japan. By focusing on beliefs and narratives concerning the “supernatural” and the “monstrous” in particular, Foster’s work explores 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.

Professor Foster is involved in an ongoing ethnographic study of village festivals, experimenting with tourism and anthropological theories to locate the performance of ritual and tradition within a transcultural and multimedia context. His publications include: “Yôkai no kyôiku [The education of monsters]” for the Japanese folklore journal Kai (August 2003); “Konchû no yôkaigaku [The demonology of insects]” (Kai, March 2003); and “The Metamorphosis of the Kappa: Transformation of Folklore to Folklorism in Japan” (Asian Folklore Studies, Fall 1998).