She studied German language and literature at Yonsei University in Seoul, Bochum, at the Free University of Berlin and completed her doctorate at the University of Dortmund with a dissertation on the forced confessions and East German literature. Beginning with doctoral and postdoctoral scholarships at the Graduate School Intermeidality at the University of Siegen, she habilitated with Metamorphosen der Madame Butterfly. Intercultural Liaisons between Literature, Opera and Film (2020), which examines both the intercultural relations between Japan/East Asia and Europe and the intermediality between literature, film and opera. 
She has lectured internationally and taught in the fields of German Studies, Media and East Asian Studies/Korean Studies and has held various fellowships and scholarships, including at Columbia University in New York City, the School of Advanced Study/University of London, Seoul National University and Chuo University in Tokyo.
Website: https://hyunseonlee.com

Florentino Rodao

Complutense University of Madrid

Bio: Catedrático de la Universidad Complutense y Doctor en Historia contemporánea por la Universidad Complutense (1993) y Doctor en Ciencias y Letras por la Universidad de Tokio (2007) (地域文化研究教養学部東京大学), con la Tesis La Comunidad Española en Filipinas, 1935-1939. El impacto de la Guerra Civil Española y de los comienzos de los preparativos de la independencia de Filipinas en su evolución e identidad. Ha sido investigador visitante en las Universidades de Tokio (2002), Harvard (2008, 2010), y en la South Pacific (2012, Suva, Fiji) y ha impartido docencia en la Universidad de Keiō, en la Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Japón), en el Ateneo de Manila (Filipinas, en Wisconsin y en Puerto Rico (USA). Es profesor de la Facultad de Ciencias de la Información de la UCM, del Máster Interuniversitario de Historia Contemporánea de la UCM, del Máster Universitario en Estudios Internacionales de la Universidad del País Vasco, del Máster de Asia Oriental de la Universidad de Salamanca, de los Cursos Revolución, Nacionalismo y Capitalismo de Vietnam y La Visión del Otro: Imágenes mutuas entre Japón y España en la Universidad Carlos II de Madrid, Ha publicado Españoles en Siam (1540-1939). Una aportación al estudio de la presencia ibérica en Asia Oriental (CSIC, 1998) Franquistas sin Franco. Una historia alternativa de la Guerra Civil en Filipinas (Granada: Comares, 2012) y, sobre Japón, Franco y el Imperio Japonés. Imágenes y propaganda en tiempos de guerra (Plaza & Janes, 2002) y La Soledad del país Vulnerable. Japón desde 1945 (Crítica, 2019). El Ministerio de Exteriores Japonés le concedió en 2018 un agradecimiento por su "impulso a la investigación sobre Japón" y en 2020 ha sido miembro del jurado de los premios Casa Asia.

Irene González López

Birkbeck Collage, University of London

Bio: Dr Irene González-López is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research spans Japanese creative industries, with a special focus on postwar cinema and issues related to gender and sexuality, both in front and behind the camera. Her publications explore topics of representation, female authorship, memory, adaptation and remakes, and reception. In 2018 she co-edited the first academic book on actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo (Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity; Edinburgh University Press). She is currently working on a monograph on the representation of sex work in Japanese cinema (Michigan University Press, 2025), and on an edited volume on documentary director Haneda Sumiko (Routledge, 2025). Other recent publications include ‘How to sell a remake: The Gate of Flesh media franchise” (2023); ‘Red-Light Bases (1953), a Cross-temporal Contact Zone’ (2022); and “‘Female Director’: Discourses and Practices in Contemporary Japan” (co-authored with Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández, 2022). Besides academia, Irene often collaborates with film festivals like Open City Doc, film distributors like Arrow Films, and institutions like the British Film Institute, Filmoteca de Catalunya, and Japan Foundation.

Dolores Martinez

Emeritus reader SOAS, University of London / University of Oxford

Bio: Dolores P. Martinez is Emeritus Reader in anthropology at SOAS, University of London, and a research affiliate at ISCA, University of Oxford. She has written on maritime anthropology, tourism, religion, gender and popular culture in Japan, and on women’s football in the United States, documentary film and humour in science fiction films. Her latest publications include Remaking Kurosawa (Palgrave, 2009); Gender and Japanese Society (Routledge, 2014); with G. Kirsch and M. White as co-editors, Assembling Japan (Peter Lang, 2015); and Persistently Postwar: Media and the Politics of Memory in Japan (2019), co-edited with B. Guarné and A. Lozano-Méndez (Berghahn).

Anastasia Fedorova

Kyoto University

Bio: My research and teaching focus is on Japanese film and media. In my dissertation,which was later published as the monograph, Illusion of Realism: History of Soviet-Japanese Cinematic Interactions, 1925-1955 (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2018), I present the concept of realism as a recurrent concern and the chief motivating force behind the interactions between Soviet and Japanese filmmakers, critics, and audiences. At Hakubi, I plan to extend my work on the 1950s, highlighting the decade as a transitional yet crucial moment in Japanese history, wherein different visions of the country’s future emerged and were negotiated by and through media. Issues of democracy (minshu-shugi) were among the ones most frequently discussed during this period. Film as a mass medium was manufactured and consumed “collectively,” and served as a space in which the role of the “common people” in the reconstruction of post-war Japan was debated. In my project, I hope to reach a more profound understanding of Japan’s complicated relationship with the concept and practice of “democracy” (i.e., people’s rule) through the study of independent “message films” and comedies that exhibit the early Cold War’s ideologies and politics.

Marketa Bajgerova

University of Vienna, Webster University

Bio: Marketa Bajgerova Verly is a Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, conducting a project relating to the memory politics of Shanghai Jewish Refugees in Xi Jinping’s China. In 2024 she obtained her PhD from the University of Vienna focusing on the research of WWII museums in contemporary China, while simultaneously working as a China expert in the Globalized Memorial Museums ERC project at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Previously she obtained an MA degree in China Studies (Politics and International Relations) from Peking University. In China she led a Dean’s Grant project mapping 30 museums across different Chinese provinces devoted to the memory of the War of Resistance against Japan and its memory politics. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Glasgow in Politics and History.

Edward Vickers

Kyushu University

Bio: Edward Vickers holds the UNESCO Chair in Education for Peace, Social Justice and Global Citizenship at Kyushu University, Japan, and is currently President of the Comparative Education Society of Asia. He researches the history and politics of education in contemporary Asia, especially in Chinese societies (the PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan). He also researches the politics of conflict-related heritage in Asia. His books include Education and Society in Post-Mao China (2017; with Zeng Xiaodong), Constructing Modern Asian Citizenship (2015; with Krishna Kumar), and Remembering Asia's World War Two (2019; with Mark Frost and Daniel Schumacher). Prof. Vickers also co-authored the 2017 UNESCO report Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century: the State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia. He is currently working with Mark Frost and Hasini Haputhanthri on an edited volume provisionally entitled Violent Heritage in Modern Sri Lanka: Past Conflict as Public HIstory. Vickers is currently researching the history and politics of education in contemporary Asia, with a particular focus on Chinese societies, politics of public history and memory in Asia, and have been involved since 2014 in the War Memoryscapes in Asia Partnership led by Mark Frost of UCL.

Raúl Fortes 

Universitat de València

Bio: Raúl Fortes-Guerrero received his BA in Audiovisual Communication, his BA in History of Art with Special Distinction, and his PhD Cum Laude and International Doctor Mention in History of Art from the Universitat de València (University of Valencia), where he has developed most of his career as a lecturer and researcher. He was granted up to four fellowships, thanks to which he could stay at Waseda University (Tokyo), Birkbeck College – University of London, and the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). He is a member of the European Association for Japanese Studies (EAJS) and the Japanese poetry society Chikuhaku-kai, in whose renowned literary magazine Kokoro no Hana he gets his tanka poems published monthly. Besides his literary works (poems awarded at international contests and published in collaborative books as well as in Spanish and foreign poetry anthologies), he is the author of many scientific articles, book chapters, and books, including a monograph on Hayao Miyazaki (Hayao Miyazaki, Akal, 2019) and a film guide for his movie Spirited Away (“El viaje de Chihiro”. Hayao Miyazaki (2001), Nau Llibres/Octaedro, 2011). In fact, the oeuvre of Hayao Miyazaki is one of his two main fields of specialization together with the influence of Japanese performing arts on Japanese cinema, as shown not only by his publications, but also by his more than forty papers in national and international scientific conferences and symposiums organized by academic institutions such as Goethe University Frankfurt, University of Warsaw, and Salford University. Currently, he combines his job as a teacher of Japanese language and culture at the Universitat de València with his task as coordinator of the Asia and Oceania Committees at the International Observatory of Intangible Culture and Global Village of this academic institution. To this can be added his work as a member of scientific committees for congresses and scientific journals.

Hyun Kyung Lee

Sogang University

Bio: Hyun Kyung Lee is an Assistant Professor at Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University in South Korea. Her research interests include difficult heritage (colonial/Cold War heritage) in East Asia, transnational heritage networking, heritage ethics, and peace-building at UNESCO. She is the author of Difficult Heritage in Nation Building: South Korea and Post-conflict Japanese Colonial Occupation Architecture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Her co-authored book is Heritage, Memory, and Punishment: Remembering Colonial Prisons in East Asia written in collaboration with her Taiwanese colleague Shu-Mei Huang (Routledge, 2019).  Her most recent collaboration with colleagues Shu-Mei Huang and Edward Vickers, an edited volume titled Frontiers of Memory: Difficult Heritage and Cross-border Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism is published with Hong Kong University Press (2022). As a heritage professional, as a heritage professional, she is a Member of the Korean Committee for UNESCO Memory of the World, Cultural Heritage Administration of Korea. She focuses not only on analysing transnational memory politics of difficult heritage, but also on examining practical ways of reconciliation and resolving memory conflicts.