Contributions: Brian Burke-Gaffney
Brian Burke-Gaffney was born in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1950 and came to Japan in 1972, going on to train for nine years as an ordained monk of the Rinzai Zen Sect. He moved to Nagasaki in 1982. He is currently professor of cultural history at the Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science and honorary director of Glover Garden. He received the Nagasaki Prefecture Citizens Award in 1992 and the Nagasaki Shinbun Culture Award in 2016. He has published several books in Japanese and English, including Starcrossed: A Biography of Madame Butterfly (EastBridge, 2004) and Nagasaki: The British Experience 1854–1945 (Global Oriental UK, 2009).
Contributions: Chad R. Diehl
Chad R. Diehl received his PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in 2011, specializing in modern Japanese history. He has researched the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and its aftermath since 2003 and published his first monograph, Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives, with Cornell University Press in 2018.
Contributions: Anna Gasha
Anna Gasha is a doctoral candidate in historic preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Her research interests include the relationships between disasters and preservation and the history and politics of science and technology within preservation practice. She graduated with a BA in history of art and architecture and an ScB in materials engineering from Brown University, and she holds an MS in structural engineering, mechanics, and materials from University of California, Berkeley. She is of Japanese and Okinawan descent.
Contributions: Anthony Richard Haynes
Anthony Richard Haynes received his PhD in Christian ethics and practical theology from the University of Edinburgh in 2018. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the connection between art and mysticism in the life and thought of the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. He has since worked as an adjunct professor and visiting lecturer in philosophy and religious studies for several universities, including Lakeland University (Japan Campus) and, most recently, the University of Santo Tomas (Philippines). His academic research centers on the practical expression of religious belief and experience, particularly in fiction, visual art, and ascetic ways of life.
Contributions: Michele M. Mason
Michele M. Mason is associate professor of Japanese cultural studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her interests include colonial and postcolonial studies, gender and feminist theory, masculinity studies, environmental humanities, and contents tourism. Mason is also dedicated to the study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in literature and history, nuclear abolition, global hibakusha movements, and nuclear power. She is the author of Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan: Envisioning the Periphery and Nation-State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and coproduced, with Kathy Sloane, the award-winning documentary film Witness to Hiroshima (witnesstohiroshima.com).
Contributions: Gwyn McClelland
Gwyn McClelland is an oral historian who studies the impact of trauma in religious narratives. He is currently lecturer in Japanese studies at the University of New England, Anaiwan Country, Australia, and is the author of Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki: Prayers, Protests and Catholic Survivor Narratives (Routledge, 2020). His work has also recently been published in History Workshop Journal and Journal of Cultural Economy, and he is a recent Japan Foundation Fellow researching the experiences of Hidden Christians and Catholics in the Goto Archipelago.
Contributions: TokusaburĹŤ Nagai
TokusaburĹŤ Nagai is the grandson of Takashi Nagai and the director of the Nagasaki City Nagai Takashi Memorial Museum.
Contributions: Maika Nakao
Maika Nakao is an associate professor at Hiroshima University. She received her PhD in the history of science from the University of Tokyo and is an expert in the nuclear history of Japan. She also worked at Nagasaki University from 2018 to 2021. She coedited the book The Seventy-Five Years after the Atomic Bombing: Tracing the Memories and Records of Nagasaki (Shoshi tsukumo, 2021) and has published two monographs: Scientists and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice: The Border between Science and Non-Science (Seidosha, 2019) and Allure of Nuclear: Science Culture in Prewar Japan and the Emergence of “Atomic Utopia” (Keisō shobō, 2015).
Contributions: Haeseong Park
Haeseong Park is currently an instructor in the Community Faculty at Metropolitan State University. She has published several journal articles, including many on Christianity in Korea, such as “Christian Feminist Helen Kim and Her Compromise for the Service to Syngman Rhee” in Korea Journal (2020).
Contributions: Franklin Rausch
Franklin Rausch received his PhD from the University of British Columbia and is an associate professor in the History and Philosophy Department at Lander University in Greenwood, South Carolina. His research focuses on Korean religious history, particularly Catholicism. He has published several articles, including “The Late ChosĹŹn Korean Catholic Archives: Documenting this World and the Next” in Journal of Korean Studies (October 2019). He has also contributed two articles on Korean Catholicism to The Palgrave Handbook of the Catholic Church in East Asia. His recent translation with Jieun Han, An ChunggĹn: His Life and Thought in His Own Words, was published by Brill in 2020.
Contributions: Nanase Shirokawa
Nanase Shirokawa is a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying art and architectural history. Her research focuses on memory and visual culture in postwar Japan.
Contributions: Shinji Takahashi
Shinji Takahashi is one of the foremost scholars of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and was formerly a professor at Nagasaki University. He has written and coedited numerous books on Nagasaki and has been active in the antinuclear peace movement since the 1970s.
Contributions: Anri Yasuda
Anri Yasuda is an assistant professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of Virginia. Her monograph Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics, 1890-1930 is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.