Anne Sokolsky
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 first 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. Her second book, an edited volume titled Bold Breaks: Japanese Women and Literary Narratives of Divorce (University of Hawai’i Press, 2025), includes a translation of Tamura’s first published story “Tsuyuwake goromo.” Sokolsky’s research on Tamura has appeared in scholarly journals published in the United States and Japan. Other research projects include the translation of Shigemitsu Mamoru’s Sugamo prison diary and the literary production and reception of women’s writing in Taiwan during Japan’s rule of the country from 1895-1945. Sokolsky is also working on a biography of her grandfather, who was a journalist in Shanghai in the early part of the twentieth century.
Sokolsky lived in Japan for six years. Prior to Japan, she spent two years in Morocco where she was a Peace Corps volunteer. She learned Moroccan Arabic and then continued studying Arabic at Harvard University, where she received a M.Ed. in International Education and Development. At U.C. Berkeley, she received the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor award (2002) and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (2001-2002) fellowship to support the writing of her dissertation.
Sokolsky’s teaching experience has included the University of Southern California, U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Santa Barbara, and Ohio Wesleyan University. At Ohio Wesleyan, Sokolsky was professor and chair of the Comparative Literature Department. In 2018, she became an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa and in 2021, she received Ohio Wesleyan University’s Welch Award for Scholarly Achievement.
In 2022, she held the Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University. Sokolsky has also been a visiting scholar at the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan (ERCCT) at Tübingen University (2023) and Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan (2024).
She is the Literature Editor for the Journal of Japanese Language and Literature.
Learning & Teaching
- INTL 101 Introduction to International Studies: The Making of the Modern World
- JAPN 111 First Year Japanese
- W101 First Year Writing (The Art, Politics, and Economics of Travel Writing)
- EAST 235 Introduction to Modern Chinese and Japanese Literature
- EAST 264 East Asian Film
- EAST 264 Taiwan Women’s World
- EAST 264 Money Talks: Women, Economics, and East Asian Literature
- EAST 264 Bad Girls of Japan
- DH 200 Silk Road Travel Stories and Digital Humanities
Works
Books:
Bold Breaks: Japanese Women and Literary Narratives of Divorce (University of Hawai’i Press, 2025). https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/bold-breaks-japanese-women-and-literary-narratives-of-divorce
From New Woman Writer to Socialist: The Life and Selected Writings of Tamura Toshiko 1936-1938 (Brill Publishers, 2015). https://brill.com/display/title/26198
Book Chapters:
- “Expressing Emotions in a Colonial Context: Huang Fengzi’s Taiwan no shōjo (A Young Girl of Taiwan).” The Politics of Emotion in Taiwan (Routledge Press, forthcoming).
- “Miyamoto Yuriko and Socialist Writers.” The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 164 - 169.
Selected Journal Articles
- “Retranslating the Tokyo Trial: Shigemitsu Mamoru’s Prison Diary,” The Twelfth International Convention of Asia Scholars ICAS 12, volume 1 (June 2022): 674-682.
- “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.” Japanese Studies Association Journal, vol. 8 (December 2010): 239 – 266.
- “Dorei: A Play by Tamura Toshiko.” Co-written with Timothy Yamamura. Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 27, no. 2 (Fall 2010): pp. 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.