About

Justine Wiesinger, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Japanese at Bates, and
earned her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and literatures by Yale University
in 2018. She teaches both Japanese language courses and courses on
Japanese culture, including literature, film, and theater.

Wiesinger’s research has been published in the Asian Theatre Journal. Her
article for that publication, “Glacier or Iceberg? Spatial, Temporal, and
Contextual Distance in an International Performance of Time’s Journey
Through a Room” was awarded the 2021 Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei Prize in
Japanese Theatre Scholarship.

Wiesinger’s dissertation examines intersections between disaster and
performance in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 as well as the
earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident of 2011. Her book
project, Performing Disaster, focuses on the theater and film that emerged
from the latter events (known as 3.11 for short), and analyzes the particular
capabilities of performance to build claims to collective trauma in the
aftermath of disaster.

Justine Wiesinger is a Fulbright scholar, having conducted research for her
dissertation in 2015-2016 at Waseda University in Tokyo. She has presented
at major conferences around the world, including the AAS (Association for
Asian Studies) conference, the AJLS (Association for Japanese Literary
Studies) conference, the ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education)
conference, the Tanaka Symposium on 3.11 at Oxford University, and the
“Literature after 3.11 Today” conference at INALCO in Paris. She has been an
invited speaker at Yale University, the University of Maryland, the University of
Washington, and Cornell University.

Wiesinger’s areas of expertise include disaster, performance, horror,
contemporary Japanese theater, and modern Japanese culture. Wiesinger
also has training in Second Language Acquisition Pedagogy, adopting a task-
based approach to teaching language that emphasizes authentic materials,
inductive grammatical reasoning, and scaffolded activities that aim to center
students and prioritize active student speech and participation. She is
enthusiastic about sharing her passion for Japanese culture and language
with students and enjoys participating in the close-knit community of
scholarship that makes Bates College so special.

At Bates, Justine Wiesinger typically teaches Intermediate Japanese (JPN
201-202), Advanced Topics in Japanese (JPN 350), Japanese Horror Film
(ASJA 130), Japan on Screen (FYS 501), and Postwar Japanese Culture
(ASJA 215). Wiesinger shares in teaching Japanese Literature and Society
(ASJA 125) as well.