About

Hanna McGaughey (she/they) joined Bates in 2023 for her expertise in premodern Japanese culture and literature. She teaches Japanese language and cultural studies courses. Her research interests include gender history, intellectual history, performing arts, and digital humanities.

Growing up in Oregon, she was dissatisfied with what she considered a Euro-centric high school curriculum and decided to study Japanese language and literature at Smith College. Since then, she has lived in Japan on and off for more than a decade, including working as first an English teacher and then a translator and completing a Master’s degree at the University of Tokyo. With a grounding in the close reading of historical texts she gained there, Professor McGaughey returned to her maternal home in Germany and the Universities of Tübingen and Trier. At the latter, she finished her Doctorate in Japanology about the onstage construction of gender in noh theater as described by noh performer, playwright, director, and critic Zeami (ca. 1363 – ca. 1443) in his theoretical writings. She came to Bates from a position as a postdoctoral researcher at Hosei University in Tokyo, where she digitized manuscripts from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries constituting a part of Zeami’s textual heritage.

She is happy to have found a place at Bates where she can put all the books she has collected on her travels around the world and into the past and talk about them with whoever will listen. She came to Maine with her family and enjoys gardening and discovering Maine ingredients for Japanese cuisine with them.