JapanLab is a collaboration between the Department of History and the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. It has been generously supported by the Japan Foundation and the College of Liberal Arts. JapanLab draws together faculty across multiple disciplines, recent graduates and leading professionals in the games industry. The JapanLab team is Adam Clulow, Clay Carmouche, Kirsten Cather, Mark Ravina, Haley Price and Jessa Dahl.
Adam Clulow
Adam Clulow is a prize-winning Digital Humanities specialist. In addition to authoring two books and a wide range of other publications, he is the creator of Virtual Angkor, a comprehensive, interactive, visual representation of life in the premodern Cambodian city of Angkor. It received the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History. Clulow is also the creator of the Amboyna conspiracy trial, an interactive Digital Humanities project focused on a famous seventeenth century case involving Japanese mercenaries, Dutch officials and English merchants. It received the New South Wales Premiers History Award (Multimedia History Prize) in 2017.
Clay Carmouche (Industry Advisor)
Clay Carmouche is Narrative Director at Brass Lion Entertainment working on an unannounced project. Prior to that he was Narrative Director at 343 Industries working on Halo Infinite. While at XBOX Publishing he partnered with studios around the world to create the stories and characters behind titles such as Tell Me Why with Dontnod Entertainment and Undead Lab's State of Decay 2. At Bungie, he helped create the Destiny franchise, developing the lore, story and characters; and served as the lead writer for The Taken King expansion. Outside of games, he has written for comics, newspapers, TV and film, and is a practitioner and teacher of Kung Fu and Tai Chi. He studied history and film at Emory University, where he was a student of Dr. Mark Ravina and developed a lifelong interest in Japanese history. A native of Houston, he now lives in Seattle with his wife and two boys.
Kirsten Cather
Kirsten Cather has been teaching Japanese literature, film, and culture in the Department of Asian Studies since 2005. She is currently Director for the Center for East Asian Studies. Her research and teaching take a transhistorical, cross-media, and interdisciplinary approach. Her first book, The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan (UHI Press, 2012), analyzed landmark censorship trials of literature, films, photography, and manga and her second on “Scripting Suicide in Japan” is forthcoming from UC Press. She served as a PI in a multi-media comparative censorship project involving seven nations at the University of Sydney from 2015-18 and is now returning to the topic of censorship to develop digital archives and interactive games that will bring historically censored texts and their censors to life for contemporary audiences
Mark Ravina
Mark Ravina is Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Chair of Japanese Studies. He is author of three books and has been active in digital humanities teaching and research for a decade now. His research blog posts have been selected twice as Editors Choice by DH Now and he has taught digital humanities workshops at Emory University and Harvard University. With the support of the Japan Foundation, he organized, together with Hoyt Long and Molly DesJardin, a text mining workshop focused on the unique challenges of Japanese texts.
Haley Price (Digital Humanities Specialist)
Haley Price is a History PhD student at Brown University. She studied History and Humanities as an undergraduate at UT Austin, where she engineered her own interdisciplinary degree plan to create educational history-based video games. This study culminated in The Pazzi Conspiracy, which aims to teach students about patronage and power in 15th century Florence. She also created a video game to accompany Linda Mayhew’s Reacting to the Past classroom game on Revolutionary Russia. Some of Price’s other work includes digital timelines through ClioVis. One timeline, Violence Against Black Americans, was listed by the National Council on Public History and made editor’s choice by Digital Humanities Now.
Jessa Dahl (Outreach and Curriculum Development)
Jessa Dahl is an Assistant Professor of History at Knox College, where she teaches courses on East Asian history and digital humanities methods. Her research is focused on the intersection of transnational and local spaces, exploring how the expanding, conflicting empires of the nineteenth century shaped the communities of Japanese treaty ports, semi-colonial cities where the lines between foreign and Japanese were porous and (sometimes intentionally) confusing. Her first book project, currently in development, is an urban history of the treaty port city of Nagasaki from 1858-1905. During her time as a postdoctoral fellow in the JapanLab, she explored new models of student and faculty collaboration in educational game development (Ready, Set, Yokohama!) and virtual heritage projects (The Crafting Yokohama Project), providing both enriching experiences for students and engaging resources for teaching Japanese history. She continues to explore ways to integrate digital humanities into the classroom, creating tools like this Twine-based digital project decision tree to introduce students and faculty to the many digital platforms available for showcasing innovative student work.