Faculty Bio

Anne Sokolsky

Emerita Professor of Comparative Literature

Education

  • B.A., University of Michigan
  • M.Ed., Harvard University
  • Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

About

Anne Sokolsky received her Ph.D. in Modern Japanese Literature with a sub-specialty in Gender Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. Her book From New Woman Writer to Socialist: The Life and Selected Writings of Tamura Toshiko from 1936–1938 (Brill, 2015) is about one of Japan’s early modern feminist writers who spent two decades living in North America in the 1920s and 1930s. Sokolsky’s research on Tamura has appeared in scholarly journals published in the United States and Japan. Other research projects include an examination of the literary production of Issei and Nisei (first and second generation Japanese American) immigrants that appeared in the literary columns of newspapers geared toward Japanese American readers. Also, she is examining the cultural significance of Taiwan fujinkai (Taiwan Women’s World), a women’s magazine produced in Taiwan during Japan’s colonial rule of the country. Sokolsky is currently working on a biography of her grandfather, who was a journalist in Shanghai in the early part of the twentieth century.

Sokolsky’s teaching experience has included the University of Southern California, U.C. Berkeley, and U.C. Santa Barbara. She was also a Fulbright scholar in Japan from 2001 to 2002. In addition to living in Japan for eight years, she spent two years in Morocco, where she was a Peace Corps volunteer. While in Morocco, she learned Moroccan Arabic and then continued studying Arabic at Harvard University, where she received a M.Ed. in International Education and Development.

At Ohio Wesleyan University, she was a faculty member in the Comparative Literature Department (CMLT), which she chaired from 2012 - 2021. She retired from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2021 as Professor of Comparative Literature. During her fourteen years at Ohio Wesleyan, she was also a faculty member of the East Asian Studies Program, the Women and Gender Studies Program, and the Film Studies Program.

Areas of Interest / Expertise

  • Expertise: Japanese Literature, Gender Studies.
  • Other interests include: Chinese and Taiwanese Literature, Asian-American Literature, East Asian Film, and Arab Women Writers.

Publications / Presentations

Books

Book Chapters

  • “Tamura Toshiko.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History. Oxford University Press, 2008.
  • “After ‘The New Woman:’ Issues of Gender and Race in the Works of Tamura Toshiko from the 1910s to the 1930s” 「新しい女」とその後：田村俊子一九一〇年代作品と一九三〇年代作品におけるジェンダーと人種, The Regions of Translation: Culture, Colonialism, and Identity 翻訳の圏域：文化、植民地、アイデンティティ. Tsukuba: Tsukuba University Comparative Literature Research Group 筑波大学文化批評研究会, 2004, pp. 265–285.
  • “Miyamoto Yuriko and Socialist Writers.” The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 164–169.

Journal Articles

  • “Reading the Bodies and Voices of Naichi Women in Japanese Ruled Taiwan.” U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal, no. 46 (September 2014): 51–78.
  • “Yang Qianhe and Huang Fengzi: Two Voices of Colonial Taiwan.” Japan Studies Association Journal, volume 8 (December 2010): 239–266.
  • “Dorei: A Play By Tamura Toshiko.” Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 27, no. 2, (Fall 2010): 203–245.
  • “Writing between the Spaces of Nation and Culture: Tamura Toshiko’s 1930s Fiction about Japanese Immigrants.” U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal, no. 28, (2005): 76–108.
  • “No Place to Call Home: Negotiating the ‘Third Space’ for Returned Japanese Americans in Tamura Toshiko’s ‘Bubetsu’ (Scorn).” The Japan Review, vol. 17, (March 2005): 121–148.

Translations

  • Nishikawa Mitsuru. “A Commentary on Current Literature.” The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan, edited by Sung-Sheng Yvonne Chang, Michelle Yeh, and Ming-Ju Fan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, pp. 134–135.
  • Shiwai Min. “Kuso Realism and Pseudo-Romanticism.” The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan, pp. 135–138.
  • Ye Shitao. “An Open Letter to Mr. Shiwai Min.” The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan, pp. 138–139.
  • Wu Xinrong. “Good Writing, Bad Writing.” The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan, pp. 139–140.
  • Yidong Liang. “In Defense of Kuso Realism.” The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan, pp. 141–143.

 Conference Proceedings

  • “Writing the Political, Not Just the Personal in Tamura Toshiko’s Shôwa Period Fiction.” The Proceedings for the Association of Japanese Literary Studies. UCLA. Spring 2005.

Media

Professor Sokolsky received the 2021 Bishop Herbert Welch Award for Scholarly or Artistic Achievement