Andrea Gevurtz Arai

Acting Assistant Professor

Contact

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Courses and activities, 2026-27

Autumn 2026

JSIS 449 A /ANTH 443 A: “The Anthropology of Modern Japan” (M,W 3;30-5:20)

Honor’s 210A: “Art and Activism” (T, Th 1:30-3:20)

Winter 2027

JSIS B 305: “Global Activism”

ANTH 459 / ENVIR 459: “Culture, Ecology, and Politics ”

Winter Symposium at the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) sponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies: Three Japanese Feminist Artists and Writers will visit Seattle on February 13th, 2027 for a day-long event of presentations and discussions about their art work, writing, anti-war, anti-nuclear, pro environment activism and eco-feminist collaborations across East Asia. The event will be held at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. This event is organized by Prof Andrea Arai and will be linked to her winter course ANTH 459/ENVIR 459. UW students and faculty are invited to join.

Spring 2027

JSIS B 438: ” International Conflict through Film & Arts ”

Office Hours

By appointment.

Andrea Gevurtz Arai is a cultural anthropologist of Japan and East Asia and Acting Assistant Professor in The Henry M Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. Arai was the interim chair of Korean Studies 2023-24. She is the author of The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan (2016) and Editor of Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in East Asia (July, 2025) Arai co-edited (with Clark Sorensen) Spaces of Possibility: Korea and Japan, In, Between and Beyond the Nation (2016) and with Ann Anagnost: Global Futures in East Asia (2013). Arai’s chapter “Nuclear Visuality and Popular Resistance in Hitomi Kamanaka’s Eco Disaster Documentaries,” was published in Rachel DiNitto (editor): *Eco Disaster Films in Japan*(2024).

Arai is completing a second book and ethnographic study: *Changing the Subjects: Gender, Labor and Environment in Trans-Local Japan.* Arai is also working with Chong Eun Ahn (Central WA U) and others on a new publication: “Ultra Low Birth Societies in East Asia : Crisis Discourses, Social Care and Eco-Feminist Responses,” and Arai is working on a translation of feminist art activist, Yoshiko Shimada’s on her art work and the history of feminism in Japan.

(For other publications, recent talks and other in process project and classes, see the link above for Andrea Arai’s C.V.)

Education

Columbia University, Ph.D. Anthropology, 2004
Columbia University, MPhil, Anthropology, 1999
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, M.A. Communications and Translation Studies, 1986
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, TESL Post-Bac Certificate, 1984
Occidental College, Los Angeles, California, B.A. Sociology and French, 1978