Born in Japan and growing up there, Germany, and the suburbs of New York City, Ayako Kano found continuity in her education and impressed her teachers by annotating her homework with drawings. Her father’s suggestion that she could be a scholar was the first time she realized “you could turn your studying into a job.”

As a professor of Japanese studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, her research focuses on the intersection of gender, performance, and politics, as well as Japanese cultural history from the late-19th century to the present. Kano is also core faculty in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program and affiliated faculty in Cinema Studies. Her books include Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism and Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor. Inspired by the lessons in learning she gained from her grandfather, a pharmacist, she also works to pass on the arts and crafts of academic life.

Origin Stories is a feature of OMNIA in which we highlight the journeys of members of our faculty as they followed their paths from impressionable young students to world-class scholars working at the cutting edge of their fields.