This symposium explores new approaches to Japanese culture, society, and literature by examining Tohoku (northeastern) Japan in a global context. Often seen as a remote and conservative countryside, Tohoku has, in fact, been a site of transnational exchange for centuries, with its people actively shaping and

Edo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial fiction. But how to understand the politics of this literature remains contested, in part because many of its defining characteristics—formulaicness, reuse of narratives, stock characters, linguistic play, and heavy allusion to literary canon—can seem to hold social and political realities at arm’s length. Writing Violence: The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature offers a new approach to understanding the relationship between the challenging formal features of early modern fiction and the world beyond its pages.

Join us for the third Massada Annual Lecture with Professor Mouna Maroun. Professor Maroun is a distinguished Arab-Israeli neurobiologist with a PhD in psychobiology from the University of Haifa and a postdoc from Paris XI Orsay, France. Since October 2024, she has served as the Rector of the University of Haifa – the first Arab to lead a higher education institution in Israel.