Transnational Studies - Japan and the World

Michael Facius

Associate Professor

Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo

Michael is a historian with research interests in the early modern and modern cultural history of Japan in its regional, transnational and global contexts. He is particularly fascinated by the changing patterns of knowledge exchange and circulation and the history of language and translation. Currently he is working on a book project on the functions and uses of Edo-period history in modern Japan.

Michael received his PhD in Global History and Japanese Studies at Freie Universität Berlin in 2016. He was a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the Centre for Transnational History, University College London from 2018-2020. He holds diplomas in college teaching and e-teaching and has taught and supervised in German, English and Japanese in Japanese Studies, East Asian Studies, History, Global History, Transnational Studies and Chinese Health and Humanity at Freie Universität Berlin, University College London, the University of Tokyo and during ERASMUS lectureships at Leiden and Cambridge.

Hannah Dahlberg-Dodd

Project Researcher

Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo

Hannah is a sociocultural linguist, and her research focuses on language use in popular media. In particular, she focuses on fictionalized speech styles, how they are produced, consumed, and perceived, and the relationship that these styles have with characters (kyara) and personae. She has explored these topics from a number of angles, including first-person pronoun use in shonen anime, script variation in yuri magazines, and katakana transformations in fantasy video games.

Hannah received her PhD in Japanese Linguistics at The Ohio State University in 2019, and she was a Hosei International Fund Fellow from 2019-2020. She has teaching experience in a number of subjects, including beginning and intermediate Japanese, linguistics, and media studies.

Masashi Haneda

Director of Tokyo College, Project Professor

Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo

PhD in Iranian Studies (Université de Paris III). He was a professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, the University of Tokyo for more than twenty years and was nominated as director of Tokyo College when this new institute was established in 2019. Having questions about the role of history in the contemporary world in mind, he has been working in the field of world/global history for more than ten years.

Marcin Pawel Jarzebski

Project Assistant Professor

Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo

Marcin is an environmental scientist and sustainability science expert from the training, with a strong focus on interdisciplinary research and education. In his doctoral research, he was exploring the resilience pathways of community forestry, with a case study of indigenous and non-indigenous communities in the Philippines. As post-doctoral research, he has been engaged in two major projects (a) Food Security Impacts of Industrial Crop Expansion in Sub-Sahara Africa (FICESSA), and (b) Climate change adaptation capacity development processes in Southeast Asia. In the food security project, he worked on resilience, vulnerability, and survey design and implementation in Africa. In the climate change adaptation project, he worked on a qualitative approach in which we recognize the priorities of local stakeholders and the urgency of different sectors that are affected by climate change and modeling on human health impacts caused by heat. Currently, he continues working on the resilience in the interface of industrial crops growing in Sub-Saharan Africa, but also he expanded his interests into a sustainable future society with attention to ageing and shrinking, from the perspective of not only challenges but also opportunities that these demographic processes cause. He is also interested in the ecological identity of Japanese people.

Marcin received his PhD in Sustainability Science at Sustainability Science Global Leadership Initiative Program and Natural Environmental Science Department, the University of Tokyo, in 2015. After that he worked as Project Researcher at the Integrated Research System for Sustainability Science (IR3S), as well as at Institute for Future Initiatives (IFI), the University of Tokyo, from 2016 to 2020, and he joined Tokyo College, the University of Tokyo, in 2020 as Project Assistant Professor. He has experience in teaching sustainability and interdisciplinary research.