2019 Cohort V Participants
Please note that the position and affiliation of each individual are from the time of application.
John Bradford is the U.S. Seventh Fleet Training Officer. As a Surface Warfare Officer, he served as Commanding Officer, Executive Officer, Combat Systems Officer, Chief Engineer, Navigator, and First Lieutenant in ships forward-deployed to Japan. He also completed assignments as the Seventh Fleet’s Regional Cooperation Coordinator; Country Director for Japan in the Office of the Secretary of Defense; and Asia-Pacific Politico-military Officer on the Navy Staff. Commander Bradford also serves as President of the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies (YCAPS), a non-profit organization supporting professional development and networking between thought communities in Japan’s base-hosting communities. As an adjunct fellow at Temple University’s Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies, he maintains an active research agenda focused on regional security with special attention given to maritime issues and cooperative affairs. His written work can be found in journals such as Contemporary Southeast Asia, Asia Policy, Asian Security, Asian Survey, Naval War College Review, and Naval Institute Proceedings. CDR Bradford received his BA in Asian Studies and Government from Cornell University. During his undergraduate experience, he also earned a Diploma of Indonesian Studies from Malang State University in Indonesia and trained onboard a Royal Malaysian Navy frigate. As an Olmsted Scholar, he studied Political Science at Indonesia’s Gadjah Mada University and completed an MSc from Singapore’s Rajaratnam School of International Studies where earned the United Overseas Bank (UOB) Gold Medal as the top student in Strategic Studies. More recently, he completed the Regular Course at Japan’s National Institute of Defense Studies.
Naomi Gingold is a journalist who has reported across Asia with NPR and PRI. Her extensive coverage of Japan has spanned from gender issues and sexuality to politics, religion, and pop culture/the arts; her work has frequently brought an unexpected human face to big picture issues and policy—from investigative reporting on sexism at the country’s most elite universities to reporting on the aftermath of the 3/11 triple disaster several years on. Her work has also been featured in outlets such as The Economist and Slate. She is the executive producer and co-host of a new long-form storytelling and news podcast on Asia and does ethnographic research on the evolution of media, technology, and politics in Burma. She earned a BA from Brown University in International Relations, studied music production and engineering at Berklee College of Music, and conducted master’s research at Georgetown University.
Kathryn Goldfarb is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at University of Colorado Boulder. Her research explores how social inclusion and exclusion shape holistic well-being and embodied experience. She brings together three domains—kinship, medical anthropology, and semiotics—to examine how past and present social relationships are experienced in visceral, embodied terms. In Japan, her research focuses on the stakes of disconnection from family networks. She conducts ethnographic research at child welfare institutions, with foster and adoptive families, and with networks of youth who grew up in state care. She has also conducted research on infertility treatment and the ways “blood ties” are understood in Japan. She examines how kinship ideologies articulate with discourses of Japanese national and cultural identity. She is developing a new, transnational project exploring how psychotherapists, psychiatrists, social workers, and former state wards in Japan and North America theorize attachment and childhood interpersonal trauma. She has been a postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Program on U.S.-Japan Relations. She holds a BA in English and Anthropology from Rice University and an MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.
Kristi Govella is an Assistant Professor in the Asian Studies Program at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and an Adjunct Fellow at the East-West Center. Her work deals with economic and security policy in Asia, with a particular focus on Asian regionalism and Japanese politics. She is currently working on a number of projects related to economics-security linkages, regional institutions, trade agreements, foreign investment, maritime security, outer space, and cyberspace. She is also writing a book that examines how trade liberalization shapes firms’ interests and their corresponding political strategies through a cross-sectoral analysis of the Japanese political economy. Her publications include Linking Trade and Security: Evolving Institutions and Strategies in Asia, Europe, and the United States (2013). Prior to joining the University of Hawaiʻi, Dr. Govella was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and an Associate Professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. She holds a BA in Political Science and Japanese from the University of Washington, and an MA and PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Scott Harold is a Senior Political Scientist and the Associate Director of the Center for Asia Pacific Policy at The RAND Corporation. He specializes in the foreign and defense policies of China, Japan, North and South Korea, and Taiwan, and is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. In addition to his work at RAND, Dr. Harold is an Adjunct Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he has taught since 2006; an Adjunct Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University; and an Adjust Professor at The Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. Prior to joining RAND in August 2008, Dr. Harold was a Senior Research Analyst for the John L. Thornton China Center at The Brookings Institution. He holds a BA in International Relations from Michigan State University and a PhD and MA in Political Science from Columbia University.
Jordan Heiber joined MUFG Bank, Ltd. as Deputy Representative of the Washington, DC office in 2014. In this capacity, he manages a team of analysts focused on assessing political risk in the United States, and the impacts of U.S. foreign policy on the bank’s global strategy, including in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Russia. Prior to joining MUFG, he served as Director for Japan Affairs in the Office of the United States Trade Representative, where he was involved in key aspects of the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations. He also spent seven years at the U.S. Department of State’s Offices of Korean Affairs and Japanese Affairs. He was a Mansfield Fellow from 2009-2011, with placements in Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry; the Japanese Diet; and the private sector. He previously worked as a staff reporter for the Asahi Shimbun’s Washington bureau, and spent several years as an English teacher in Japan’s Fukui Prefecture. He received a BA in Communications from Northwestern University and an MA in Asian Studies from George Washington University.
Hilary Holbrow is Lecturer in Sociology at Harvard University and an International Research Fellow at the Canon Institute for Global Studies in Tokyo. She researches and teaches on inequality, immigration, gender, race and ethnicity, and organizations, and is writing a book on how demographic decline reshapes social and economic hierarchies. She has also worked at the Japanese Embassy in Washington, DC and has lived in Kyoto, Osaka, Okinawa, Yokohama, and Tokyo. Her work on the Japanese labor market has appeared in International Migration Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Work and Occupations. Prior to joining the Sociology Department, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Program on U.S.-Japan Relations. She holds a BA in East Asian Studies from Boston University and a PhD in Sociology from Cornell University.
Akira Inayoshi is an Associate Professor of political and diplomatic history of Japan at Niigata University. His research and teaching interest lies at local politics and bureaucracy in modern Japan, focusing on infrastructure initiatives. He is the author of Kaikou no Seiji-shi (Political History of Seaports), published in 2014 by the University of Nagoya Press, which earned the 41st Fujita Award from the Tokyo Institute for Municipal Research. He received an MA and PhD in Politics from Tokyo Metropolitan University.
Kazuyo Kato is Director for Programs and Administration at Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA, a U.S. non-profit dedicated to strengthening U.S.-Japan relations. In her current capacity, she creates and develops programs engaging U.S. policymakers, experts, and business leaders on U.S.-Japan relations through events across the United States, delegation trips, and policy dialogues. She also oversees Sasakawa USA’s administrative functions to support organizational management. Prior to joining Sasakawa USA in 2014, she worked for the U.S.-Japan Exchange Program at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Tokyo from 2010 to 2014. Previously, she was an Associate at Armitage International, LLC, an international consulting firm. From 2003 to 2007, she worked on Asia projects as Research Associate of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. She began her professional career in 2001 as an Analyst at Arthur Andersen (later KMPG) in Tokyo. Ms. Kato was born in Australia, and raised in Japan, Egypt, and the United States. She holds a BA in International Relations and an MA in International Policy Studies from Stanford University. She also has a Certificate in Non-Profit Management from Duke University’s Continuing Studies Program.
Ryosuke Maeda is an Associate Professor of Japanese political and diplomatic history in the department of politics at the Hokkaido University Graduate School of Law. His research interests include nation-state/empire building, party politics of social and economic policy, and international/imperial finance in East Asia. His first book, The Beginnings of National Politics in Modern Japan: The Meiji State Reform under the Parliamentary System, 1890-1898 (University of Tokyo Press, 2016) (in Japanese) described the dynamic process of Japan’s nation-state building in the late 19th century, focusing on why and how the Meiji authoritarian state transformed the feudal system of the Tokugawa era. This book was awarded the 39th Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities in 2017. His current book project, Finance, Empire and War: The International Monetary Politics in East Asia, 1933-1952, examines the possible diplomatic choices of prewar Japan faced with the global economic crisis. There were two contradicting paths for Japan in the 1930s: the strengthening of empire and international economic cooperation. To trace the historical roots of the Bretton Woods system in East Asia, he will shed new light on the efforts of international bankers from Japan, Britain, China, France, and the United States to avoid the war and reconstruct the regional order after Japanese aggression in Manchuria. He holds a PhD from the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology.
Anna Nagamine is the Manager of Business Development Section, Technology Development and Innovation Center (TDIC) at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST). TDIC fosters innovation at OIST and in Okinawa to accelerate economic growth. Anna’s work involves developing industry partnerships, supporting entrepreneurship and incubating startups in the region. She was an integral part of the team that established the first OIST startup (focused on biotechnology) in 2014. Her interests are in understanding how science and technology can impact society in solving local and global challenges and how policies, programs and ecosystems support this process. Ms. Nagamine holds a BA from Chuo University, Faculty of Policy Studies, and an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, where she was an East-West Center Obuchi Student Scholarship recipient.
Crystal Pryor is Program Director and Research Fellow at Pacific Forum, where she focuses on nonproliferation in Asia and is developing a research agenda on cybersecurity policy. She has researched U.S.-Japan outer space security cooperation, strategic trade control implementation in advanced countries, and Japan’s defense industry and arms exports. Prior to joining Pacific Forum, Dr. Pryor held a postdoctoral fellowship in the U.S.-Japan relations program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She has worked for the University of Washington as an instructor of political science and international relations, and for the State Department at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. Dr. Pryor received a BA in International Relations from Brown University, an MA in Political Science from the University of Washington and the University of Tokyo, and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Washington.
Anand Rao is an Assistant Professor of political science and international relations at the State University of New York at Geneseo. He joined the faculty at Geneseo in 2015. Dr. Rao first went to Japan in 1996, and lived in Saga Prefecture for three years as a Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program participant. He lived in other areas of Japan for nearly seven more years after that, from 2002 to 2009, and worked at several places including the University of Tokyo and in the international department of the Japan Securities Depository Center (JASDEC). At SUNY Geneseo, he teaches courses on East Asian politics, comparative politics, terrorism and national security, and the role of democracy in international relations. Dr. Rao’s publications include an article in the Japan Studies Association Journal and a book review in International Migration Review. His research interests are wide and varied, but he is especially interested in Japanese foreign policy, Japanese party politics, and Japanese immigration politics in comparative perspective. He holds a BA in History and Political Science from Union College, an MA in Political Science from Columbia University, and a PhD in Politics from the University of Virginia.
Nicolas Sternsdorff-Cisterna is an Assistant Professor in the department of anthropology at Southern Methodist University. His book, Food Safety after Fukushima: Scientific Citizenship and the Politics of Risk, was published by the University of Hawai’i Press in 2019. His work has also appeared in American Anthropologist and Japanese Studies. In his current project, he investigates the government’s vision to move towards “Society 5.0,” a super-smart society, focusing on the uses and prospects for artificial intelligence and sensors in Japan. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the program on US-Japan Relations at Harvard University. He received a BA in Anthropology and International Development Studies from Trent University, an MA in Political Science from the University of British Columbia, and a PhD and AM in Social Anthropology from Harvard University.
Timothy Webster is Director of Asian Legal Studies and Associate Professor of Transnational Law at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). He writes about the intersections of international law and the domestic legal systems of China, Japan, and, most recently, Korea. His scholarship on international economic law, international human rights, and international dispute resolution appears inter alia in the Columbia, Michigan, NYU, and Virginia Journals of International Law. He has testified before Congress, written for domestic and international media, and lectured in French, Japanese, and Mandarin at colloquia, conferences, and workshops throughout Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. He teaches Chinese Law, International Business Transactions, International Human Rights Law, and Property at CWRU. He holds ongoing visiting professorships at Paris Sciences et Lettres (formerly, University of Paris—Dauphine), and Southwestern University of Political Science and Law (Chongqing, China). He has also been a visiting professor at National Taiwan University (Taipei), and IÉSEG School of Management (Paris), and a visiting scholar at Zhejiang University (Hangzhou, China). He started his academic career as a lecturer at Yale Law School and senior fellow at its China Law Center. He practiced international litigation in Tokyo and New York, and clerked for a judge in Boston. He is in the fourth cohort of the Public Intellectuals Program, the Chinese analogue to the U.S.-Japan Network for the Future, run by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. He holds a BA and MA in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University and a JD and LLM from Cornell Law School.