Izumi Dryden is associate professor at Mie Prefectural College of Nursing in Mie, Japan. She teaches liberal arts courses on reading in English, literature and medicine, and communications. Her current research interests include the publications and correspondence of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anthony Burgess, E. M. Forster, Florence Nightingale, and Charles Darwin, in relation to the influence of William Shakespeare, as viewed through the perspectives of Generative Anthropology.
Tomoya Fujihara is a graduate student in a Master’s degree program in the Religious Studies department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His main research interest is occult metahistory seen in the context of Japanese modernization. Through analyzing thought, people, communities, and philosophies of mind that have not been given much attention, it aims to bring to light the “dark side” of Japanese modernization.
Kiyoshi Kawahara is Professor of translation and interpreting studies at Takushoku University in Tokyo, Japan. He specializes in linguistics, social semiotics, and intercultural communication theory. He is also a Buddhist monk, clinical spiritual care worker and clinical interfaith clergy, as well as a graduate student at a doctoral program in Sophia University in Tokyo. He is now researching the relationship between spirituality and language with the aim of integrating linguistics and religious studies on the basis of Eastern philosophy, and developing and deepening a comprehensive anthropology.
Gregory J Lobo has taught at the Universidad de los Andes since 2002, in the the Department of Languages and Culture. He designed the MA in cultural studies there. He was a visiting OSUN researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies for A/Y 2023/34. His latest book is Nationism. In Defence of Open Societies (Alibri, 2024). His current book project is titled In Good Faiths: Religion, Politics, Futures.
Matthew Taylor is Professor of English at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan. He has co-authored textbooks, contributed to collections, and published essays in Anthropoetics and Contagion. He was co-organizer of the 2016 GASC conference in Nagoya, Japan, and the recent 2024 conference in Tokyo. He has twice served as guest editor of Anthropoetics, including for this issue, which includes papers from the Tokyo conference as well as his introduction.