Rate My Professor Shinko Kagaya

Shinko Kagaya serves as Professor of Japanese in the Department of Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Williams College. She earned her B.A. from Aoyama Gakuin University in 1989, M.A. in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Ohio State University in 1991, and Ph.D. from the same institution in 1999. Kagaya has held prominent research positions, including Visiting Researcher at the Noh Research Archives, Musashino University from 2015 to 2020 as part of the 14th Hakuho Foundation Japanese Research Fellowship at Waseda University. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University from 2002 to 2003, and a Project Team Member for the Research Project on the Close Examination of Nô Texts under Waseda University's 21st Century Centre of Excellence Program in 2003. Her awards include the Hamako Ito Chaplin Memorial Award in 1997 for superior accomplishment as a university instructor of Japanese language and co-winning the Association of Asian Performance Adjudicated Debut Panel competition in 2000.

Kagaya's academic interests center on Japanese performing arts, literatures, and cultures, with emphasis on performance studies and Japanese language pedagogy, particularly the cross-cultural reception of Noh and Kyogen theatre. Notable publications encompass 'Noh and Muromachi culture' (co-authored with Hiroko Miura) in A History of Japanese Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2016); 'Nôgaku during the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945-1952' in Rising From the Flames: The Rebirth of Theatre in Occupied Japan (Lexington Books, 2009); 'Dancing on a moving train: Nô between two wars' in Nô Theatre Transversal (Iudicium Verlag, 2008); 'Nô Performances in Gaichi' in Asian Theatre Journal (2001); and 'Western Audiences and the Emergent Reorientation of Meiji Nô' in Japanese Theatre and the International Stage (Brill, 2000). She has contributed translations and adaptations, including Kyogen plays for the Japan Cultural Expo and a Japanese adaptation of Murasaki’s Moon for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019. At Williams College, she teaches courses such as Elementary Japanese, The Sounds of Language: An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology, and Japanese Food Culture in a Global Context. Her scholarship advances understanding of Japanese traditional theatre's adaptation in modern and international contexts.