Dr Fusako Innami

Associate Professor in Japanese and Performance Studies

Affiliations
Affiliation	Telephone
Associate Professor in Japanese and Performance Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures	+44 (0) 191 33 43438
Fellow of the Institute for Medical Humanities
Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing

Biography

(On leave, T1-T2 in 2024-25)

Dr. Fusako Innami is Associate Professor in Japanese and Performance Studies, and author of Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan. The book examines touch as the mediated experience of the memories of previous touching and the accumulation of sensations, all of which create an interstitial space between those in contact. In Touching the Unreachable, phenomenological and psychoanalytical approaches are cross-culturally interrogated by engaging with literary touch to constantly challenge what may seem like the limit of transferability regarding concepts, words, and practices. The book aims to decentralize a Eurocentric hegemony in its production and use of theories and brings Japanese cultural and literary analyses into further productive intellectual dialogues.

Her work has been recognized by the International Federation for Theatre Research (New Scholars’ Prize, 2012), Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, and most recently, the US-UK Fulbright Commission. As 2024-25 Fulbright Scholar, based in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, her project, Gestural Writing: Performance, Topography, Trace, concerns ephemeral performance and its traces. How do we recollect live performances that are not available in recordings, but only remain in the form of reviews, scores, pictures, or digitized archives? Her project gathers traces of dancers’ transcultural movements, contacts, and memoirs, exploring new methods of reconstructing past performances.

Since her childhood study of classical ballet and music, she has reflected on what it means to integrate gestures, movements, and rhythms migrating from different continents to enter her body. Before coming to Durham in 2015, she worked on the sensation of falling bodies for her MA project in Performance Studies at New York University, and her doctoral work on touch in modern Japanese litearture at Oxford. As an academic, dance reviewer, and practitioner, Fusako conducts dance workshops in Japan, “Touch,” to translate touch in literature back to moving bodies; and an ongoing international symposium, “Translating Embodiedness,” to develop new methodologies for translating embodied practices across media.

Research Interests

life writing,
performance and performativity (Performance and Performativity - Durham University),
phenomenology and psychoanalysis,
the senses and perceptions,
intimacy,
operatic orientalism,
translation, including the translation of bodily experiences into language, inter-medial translation, and the circulation of concepts and theories.

Fusako's research concerns bodily experiments, individualities, and the theory of embodiedness with a focus on modern Japan. Artistic and intellectual encounters around this period in East Asia, Europe, and the US facilitated the sharing of aesthetic features and transcultural collaborations that have shaped the understanding of phenomenal bodies. She would be happy to supervise Master's and Doctoral students working on relevant themes/topics as above.