About

Dr. Jessica Nakamura is an associate professor and graduate advisor in the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a scholar specializing in Japanese and Transpacific theater and performance, with research interests that include performance historiography, ethics and spectatorship, performance art and visual culture, and global performance theories. Her notable work includes the book 'Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan,' which examines performances portraying previously obscured topics of Japanese war aggression and imperialism, focusing on the Heisei period. She is also a co-editor of 'Realisms in East Asian Performance,' a volume that reexamines theatrical realism across China, Japan, and Korea. Her current research project, 'Staging the Private,' explores representations of the domestic in Japanese theater from 1945 to the present, analyzing how theater reproduces, challenges, and disseminates ideas of family, gender, and nation through private spaces. Dr. Nakamura has published in various journals and edited volumes, and her writings address performance historiography, material and visual culture, and global performance theories. She has trained in Japanese Dance, Japanese Kyogen, Chinese Beijing Opera, and Balinese Dance, and has directed productions including Gao Xingjian’s 'Wild Man' and an English translation of Matsui Sh’s 'Family Portrait.' Her teaching includes courses on Asian Theater and Performance, Asian American Theater, History of Directing, and Performance and Protest.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• History
• Biology
• Sociology
• Ethnology
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Pure mathematics
• Mathematics
• Art
• Archaeology
• Genetics
• Aesthetics
• Geography
• Literature

Selected publications

• “Who's the Monster?”

  2026-02-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The oft-spoken and sometimes sung question “Who’s the monster?” in Koreeda Hirokazu’s Monster (2023) is just one of many times the film evokes monstrosity, monsters, and the acts of naming them. While Japan has a long history of monsters (kaibutsu, bakemono) representing the mysterious and fantastical, Koreeda’s film situates questions of the monstrous in everyday life. In the film’s unfolding plot that seems to be about school bullying but ends up portraying the friendship and potential romance of two young boys, the descriptor “monster” takes on shifting meanings that comment on how behavior and people are deemed outside of social norms. Putting the rich history of Japanese monsters and ideas of alterity and resistance in monster theory in conversation with notions of futurity in queer theory, this chapter explores how Koreeda’s film deploys naming the monster as a performative act to challenge existing social norms and undo a single meaning around “monster.” In so doing, the film develops an ethical engagement, activating a call and response with the unknown, that highlights future potential instead of present reality.

  PublisherDOI

• Theatricality of the Closet: Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity Between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan by Michelle Liu Carriger (review)

  Theatre Journal · 2025-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Kondo Aisuke and the Performative Remains of Japanese American Incarceration

  2024-02-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Challenge of World Theatre History by Steve Tillis (review)

  Asian Theatre Journal · 2024-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: The Challenge of World Theatre History by Steve Tillis Jessica Nakamura THE CHALLENGE OF WORLD THEATRE HISTORY. By Steve Tillis. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2020. 320 pp. Hardcover, $119.99. The title of The Challenge of World Theatre History reflects Steve Tillis's dual approach that grounds his book: the challenge of producing world theatre history and the challenge it offers to our established conventions and understandings. Throughout, Tillis engages with conceptual issues at the center of theatre historiography to argue the urgent need for global inclusivity, making it critical reading for theatre educators. While the implicit emphasis in Tillis's book is on teaching theatre history, his development of methodologies to produce world theatre history in later chapters may well be applied to the creation of scholarly texts. In its challenge, world theatre history is as much about what has existed as it is about developing new ways forward. The first half of the book is devoted to the former: Tillis's introduction identifies the "Standard Western Approach," what he describes as the prevalent approach to theatre history education, well ingrained in survey classes, textbooks, and anthologies. To explore why world theatre history has been slow to be implemented, Tillis's second chapter identifies and "rebut[s]" arguments against world theatre history (p. 32). In his third chapter, Tillis identifies the "historiographical fallacies" of the Standard Western Approach (p. 61). In these two foundational chapters, Tillis undoes the thinking behind this existing approach to theatre history, pinpointing the false assumptions about space and time [End Page 218] that underlie its historiography. He uses scholars from the long-established school of world history to support his claims, while revealing that the nascent field of world theatre history is years behind historiographical work elsewhere. In the second half of the book, Tillis outlines new methodologies to producing world theatre history, methodologies that emphasize comparison and multiplicity. In his fourth chapter, Tillis identifies the basic units in world theatre history writing, theatrical events, and theatrical forms that lend themselves to comparative work. If the Standard Western Approach is based on assumptions about space and time, Tillis's final four chapters develop ways of thinking about space and time that are conducive to considering the world. Chapter five reevaluates geography to move beyond the nation-state model. The final three chapters examine conceptions of time, with Tillis first offering a long-durée approach to theatre history (chapter six), exploring how we think of continuities and change (chapter seven), and reexamining how we conceive of historical periods (chapter eight). With Tillis's new methods, world theatre history emerges as a malleable construction. The last three chapters read as a methodological toolkit, with Tillis making multiple suggestions to highlight the openness of this historiography. In several of his models, for instance, Tillis provides attention to shifting spatial and temporal scales, calling our attention to the possibilities of scaling up and scaling down in geographical regions and views of temporality. These efforts reveal the flexibility available within world theatre history, while also highlighting a point that Tillis makes throughout: world theatre history makes for better theatre history. Or, as he explains it early on: the "disinclination toward" world theatre history is "self-defeating for theatre studies" (p. 32). Along with identifying multiple approaches to world theatre history, the second half of the book shows Tillis modeling world theatre history making. When outlining new methods, Tillis is diverse in the examples he provides, moving frequently and easily across the globe. Tillis's examples begin to demonstrate how we may start to produce world theatre history while also reaffirming Tillis's insistence on the applicability of his methodologies. The clarity and thoroughness with which The Challenge of World Theatre History argues its case makes it a valued resource in thinking through how to teach theatre history. The complaints that Tillis has are, sadly, not new, but his arguments are a delight for those of us working in "global" or "world" theatre forms—Tillis's thoroughness at dismantling the logic of the Standard Western Approach is critical [End Page 219] in undermining its place as the status quo. As many of us reevaluate our curricula to center...

  PublisherDOI

• Realisms in East Asian Performance

  University of Michigan Press eBooks · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  bookSenior author

  We are fortunate to be colleagues at the same institution, where Realisms in East Asian Performance developed out of our mutual interest in theatrical realism and shared observations about its many manifestations in the performance forms we study.Our early conversations resulted in the conference Realisms in East Asian Performing Arts, originally scheduled for May 2020 and reorganized in an online format in October 2020.In this volume's journey from preliminary discussions to conference to book, we are grateful for the generosity of a number of parties along the way.We first extend our gratitude to the scholars and performers who participated in the 2020 conference; their presentations and our discussions were critical in shaping the volume.We also thank the many people and UCSB campus units involved in the details of organizing and supporting the conference: East Asia Center academic coordinator Lisa McAllister and graduate student assistant Rebecca Wear for their problem-solving acumen and energy in planning and running a virtual conference and Eric Mills and Severo De La Cruz of our respective departments for coordinating finances during the lengthy process from conference through publication.

  PublisherDOI

• Realisms in East Asian Performance

  2023 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • History

  We are fortunate to be colleagues at the same institution, where Realisms in East Asian Performance developed out of our mutual interest in theatrical realism and shared observations about its many manifestations in the performance forms we study.Our early conversations resulted in the conference Realisms in East Asian Performing Arts, originally scheduled for May 2020 and reorganized in an online format in October 2020.In this volume's journey from preliminary discussions to conference to book, we are grateful for the generosity of a number of parties along the way.We first extend our gratitude to the scholars and performers who participated in the 2020 conference; their presentations and our discussions were critical in shaping the volume.We also thank the many people and UCSB campus units involved in the details of organizing and supporting the conference: East Asia Center academic coordinator Lisa McAllister and graduate student assistant Rebecca Wear for their problem-solving acumen and energy in planning and running a virtual conference and Eric Mills and Severo De La Cruz of our respective departments for coordinating finances during the lengthy process from conference through publication.

  PublisherDOI

• Witnessing the Mundane

  Performance Research · 2023-05-19

  article1st authorCorresponding

  'Witnessing the Mundane: Spectatorship and the domestic onstage' by Jessica Nakamura considers how performance can facilitate noticing the mundane and the ethical implications of such noticing. The article analyses contemporary Japanese playwright/director Yamada Yuri's Wakarō to ha omotteiru kedo (2019) (English title: I'm Trying to Understand You, But … ) to focus on the portrayal of the mundane in domestic settings. Taking place over the course of one evening in the dining room of a woman called Teru's apartment, Wakarō highlights the mundane elements of our domestic lives while calling attention to their concealment. As the play unfolds and Teru tells her boyfriend Koh about her pregnancy and concerns about it, Wakarō reveals that the home space can contain the potential for pain and domestic everyday activities can conceal harmful acts.

  PublisherDOI

• Between Japan and the Global: Marking Okada Toshiki’s innovations <i>Okada Toshiki &amp; Japanese Theatre</i> edited by Peter Eckersall, Barbara Geilhorn, Andreas Regelsberger and Cody Poulton, Aberystwyth: Performance Research Books, 2021; pp. 269

  Performance Research · 2023-01-02

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Illuminating the universal: the multilingual <i>Uncle Vanya</i> in <i>Drive My Car</i>

  Asian Ethnicity · 2022-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This film review explores Drive My Car's use of Uncle Vanya, understanding it in the contexts of modern and contemporary Japanese theater history and analyzing the role of the play in the film's portrayal of human connection.

  PublisherDOI

• Canons in Motion: Japanese Performance, Theatre History, and the Currents of Knowledge

  2021-11-01

  book-chapterSenior author

  Written as a dialogue between two Japanese performance specialists who negotiate between the fields of theatre studies and Japanese studies, this chapter explores the productive potential of putting multiple canons in conversation. Identifying several canons in each respective field, the chapter marks the ways in which these canons, each with their own limitations, affect ideas about Asian theatre that move from the classroom to graduate training to scholarship. The chapter argues for putting multiple “canons in motion,” a holistic approach to pedagogy, scholarly inquiry, and artistic practice that acknowledges and directs field-specific currents of knowledge to converge and flow together.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Katherine Saltzman-Li

  2 shared

• Yosuke Yamazaki

  1 shared

• Michio Tsuchida

  1 shared

• Terumi Okada Ozawa

  Universidade de São Paulo

  1 shared

• Tatsushi Arai

  Kent State University

  1 shared

• Jyana S. Browne

  1 shared