Michael Foster is an assistant professor of Folklore

Folklore

Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

 at Indiana University Bloomington

Indiana University Bloomington

Indiana University Bloomington is a public research university located in Bloomington, Indiana, in the United States. IU Bloomington is the flagship campus of the Indiana University system. Being the flagship campus, IU Bloomington is often referred to simply as IU or Indiana...

. He has taught in some capacity since 1989, starting in Japan teaching the English language, returning to the states to teach Japanese, and moving on to Japanese folklore and literature. In addition to his academic career, which has mainly focused on Japanese literature and culture, he has published several short stories. Much of his work on Japanese folklore has centered around tales of the supernatural—the strange and the weird. That is the subject of his first book, Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yôkai, which received the Chicago Folklore Prize in 2009.

Education

Foster Studied English in his undergraduate institution of Wesleyan University

Wesleyan University

Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...

, and graduated with Honors. For his Masters he studied Japanese Literature and Folklore at University of California, Berkley, where his folklore studies were influenced by Alan Dundes

Alan Dundes

Alan Dundes, was a folklorist at the University of California, Berkeley. His work was said to have been central to establishing the study of folklore as an academic discipline. He wrote 12 books, both academic and popular, and edited or co-wrote two dozen more...

. He also did intensive language study in Yokohama, Japan and studied History and Folklore at Kanagawa University

Kanagawa University

, abbreviated to is a private university in Japan. The main campus is located in Rokkakubashi, Kanagawa-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture.- History :The university was founded in 1928 by as . It was an evening school for the working youth...

. He earned his Ph. D from Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, in the department of Asian Languages (Japanese).

Published works

• Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yôkai. University of California Press(2009)

• “Hometowns, Ghost Towns, and Memories of War: A Haunted Travelogue.”Mechademia 4 (forthcoming 2009).

• “Haunted Travelogue: Hometowns, Ghost Towns, and Memories of War.”Mechademia Vol. 4: War/Time (forthcoming 2009).

• “What time is this picture? Cameraphones, tourism, and the digital gaze in Japan.” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture Vol. 15, Issue 3 (May 2009): 351-372.

• “The Otherworlds of Mizuki Shigeru.” Mechademia Vol. 3: Limits of the Human (2008): 8-28.

• “The Question of the Slit-Mouthed Woman: Contemporary Legend, the Beauty Industry, and Women’s Weekly Magazines in Japan.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 32, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 699-726.

• “Strange Games and Enchanted Science: The Mystery of Kokkuri.” The Journal of Asian Studies 65: 2 (May 2006): 251-275.

• “Walking in the City with Natsume Sôseki: The Metaphorical Landscape in ‘Koto no sorane.’” Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies, vol. 6 (Summer 2005): 137-146.

• “Watashi, kirei? Josei shûkanshi ni mirareru ‘Kuchi-sake-onna’ [Am I pretty? The ‘Kuchi-sake-onna’ legend as seen in women’s weekly magazines].” Ed. Komatsu Kazuhiko, Nihon yôkaigaku taizen (Tokyo: Shôgakkan, 2003): 635-667.

• “Creating Monsters: Toriyama Sekien and the Encyclopedic Imagination.” Information des Akademischen Arbeitskreises Japan: Minikomi (University of Vienna) no. 64 (2002/2): 7-9.

• “The Metamorphosis of the Kappa: Transformation of Folklore to Folklorism in Japan.” Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 57 (Fall 1998): 1-24.

• “Kindai ni okeru kappa no henyô: kappa to mizu no kankei o megutte [Exploring the Waters: Modern Transformations of the Kappa].” Rekishi minzoku shiryôgaku kenkyû (History and Folk Culture Studies), vol. 2 (1997): 161-74.

Short stories

“Looking Back.” Greensboro Review no. 67 (Spring 2000): 107-115.

“Old Mack” and “Late Night With Me.” Wisconsin Review vol. 32, no. 2 (1998): 11-14.

“Sepia.” Southern Humanities Review vol. 29, no. 4 (1995): 345-359; winner of Hoepfner Award for best short story in Southern Humanities Review (1995).

“Toothpicks.” Northwest Review vol. 30, no. 2 (1992): 59-66.

Research interests

Michael Foster's interests include Japanese folklore, history, festival, literature, supernatural, and popular culture.

He is currently working on a book entitled Visiting Strangers: Tourists, Ethnographers, and Gods, which will look at tourism, festivals, and ethnographers in Japan.

A video profile in which Michael Foster discusses his past and present research interests has been published on the Indiana University Bloomington You Tube Channel.