Alex Murphy

Alex 2021
Cohort Year: 2014
Research Interests: Japan
Education: BA: Kenyon College, 2010 MA: Columbia University, 2014

Biography

My research interests center on transnational literature, performance, and media in twentieth-century Japan. My dissertation explores the performing arts and media culture of Japan's interwar period with a focus on modes of vocal performance across poetry, popular music, and theater. In particular, I am interested in examining how these embodied practices of voicing intersected with the figure of 'voice' as a figurative heading for aesthetic and political expression via emergent technologies of amplification, broadcast, and sound recording. In so doing, I turn an ear to the overlapping imperial soundscapes of the interwar Asia-Pacific and the transnational network of performers and social actors who generated and traversed them. By tracing these sonic pathways, I hope to arrive at new ways of understanding the cultural politics of race, gender, and mobility across this period.