Fitxa persona

Marcos Centeno is a Japanese Studies and Visual Culture scholar, particularly interested in documentary film and its theoretical debate developed in Japan, image studies, transculturality, memory and the representation of minorities, particularly the Ainu people, for which he uses contributions from visual anthropology and ethnographic studies. At the University of Valencia, he contributed to creating its Certificate in Japanese Studies. Centeno is also honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, where he was the Japanese Studies Programme director, and established a single honours BA Japanese Studies with a great emphasis on diversity and minorities, which became one of the most popular of this kind in the UK in terms of student numbers. He is also Research Associate at the JRC (Japan Research Centre) at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London, where had been lecturer for the Department of Japan and Korea and coordinated the MA Global Cinemas and the Transcultural. Centeno has led projects funded by British, Japanese, North American and Spanish institutions. He currently coordinates TRADIASIA (Transculturality and Diversity in East Asia) funded by Eurasia Foundation. His project Tsuchimoto Noriaki's documentary school: from his training in Iwanami Productions to his early political activism (1962-69) has recently received a grant by the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University and Representations of the Ainu people in the UK has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science. For several years he has coordinated Japanese Documentary Filmmaker Haneda Sumiko project. Authorship and Gender Discourses with colleagues from the UK and funded by institutions such as Sasakawa Foundation, the Japan Foundation, Birkbeck Research Committee Strategic Funds, BIMI (Birkbeck Institute for Moving Images) and The Open City Documentary Film Festival London. Previously, his project Japanese Transnational Cinema (2018/19) was funded by the Sasakawa and Daiwa foundations, Waseda University and Monbusho (Ministry of Education of Japan). After studying Ainu language and culture in Japan, his research on the visual representation of the Ainu people was awarded by the former Kokoro journal for Japanese Studies, and his full-length documentary, Ainu. Pathways to Memory (2014), directed after having worked as a television director, was translated into several languages and received several prize from international film festivals and other institutions (such as the National Museum of Anthropology, CSIC and the Government of the Basque Country). During his doctoral studies, he was a research fellow at the University of Valencia (2009-2013) and an associate researcher at the International Institute for Education and Research in Theater and Film Arts at Waseda University, Tokyo (2010-2013).

Other activities

Among his professional activities, Centeno is currently a board member for the AEJE (Asociacion de Estudios Japoneses en España), and external examiner for the Japanese Studies degree programmes at Oxford Brookes University (2021-2025), editorial board member for Mirai. Revista Estudios Japoneses, has been jury member for ICAS/SEPHIS prize for the best books on Asian Studies written in Spanish and Portuguese, Ivan Morris Memorial Prize on Japanese Studies (awarded by the British Association for Japanese Studies), DAAD. German Academic Exchange Service (research fellowship applications),  convenor for EAJS (the European Association for Japanese Studies) Visual Arts section (2019-2023), board member for BIMI (Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image), the Japan Research Center, SOAS. On culture, memory and representation in museums, Centneo has coordinated the Memorial Sites research seminar at Birkbeck Memorial Sites. Acts of Remember through Media and Visual Culture (2022/2023) and is a member of the Repercri group and on transnational cultural circulation he works with Gregal group at the UAB. Also, Centeno has served as a guest lecturer for Summer Schools at Pittsburgh University,  Ochanomizu University, guest lecturer for the Centre for Japanese Studies at Nanzan University, Nagoya (1^st semester 2021/22), and invited to deliver around 60 talks at universities from Latin America, Europe and Japan. He held grants and fellowships during  his undergraduate and postgraduate studies between Spain (graduated from Universitat de València in 2006 with the School´s Extraordinary Award) and Japan (on a Waseda University scholarship), with periods in France (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3) and Germany (Goethe Universität Frankfurt).

Teaching

-Film Direction and Production. BA Audiovisual Communication and BE Multimedia Engineering

-Japanese Cinema. Certificate in Japanese Studies

-Japanese culture and diversity. Certificate in Japanese Studies

-Japanese contemporary society. Certificate in Japanese Studies

Supervision

Marcos Centeno welcomes students interested in research in the fields related to Japanese/Asian Cinemas, ethnographic visual culture, documentary films, transculturality, diversity, representation of minorities, and war memory.

Selected Publications

Centeno, M. and Raine, Michael, eds. (2021) "Developments in the Japanese Documentary Mode", Arts, 9 (3).

    Centeno, M. and Morita, Nori eds (2020). Japan beyond its Borders: Transnational Approaches to Film and Media, Tokyo: Seibunsha

Centeno, M. and Morita, Nori, eds. (2020), "Japanese Transnational Cinema", Arts 7(4).

Centeno, M., González, I. and Armendáriz, A. (eds) (2024), The Japanese Documentary Cinema of Haneda Sumiko. Art, Gender, Society, and Culture. London, New York: Routledge (forthcoming).    

Centeno, M. and Torres, L. eds, (2023). ReFocus: The Films of Teshigahara Hiroshi. ReFocus: The International Directors Series. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (forthcoming)

Sánchez-Biosca. V. and Centeno, M., eds (2023) Memorialising the Ground Zero. Narrating Sites of Mass Crimes and Genocide through the Camera Lens. Museums and Narratives series. Berlin: De Gruyter (forthcoming)

Centeno, M. (2022). “The Ainu in Documentary Films: Promiscuous Iconography and the Absent Image”. In David Desser (ed.) Companion to Japanese Cinema. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2022, pp. 271- 293.

Centeno, M. (2021). "1968 And Rural Japan as A Site of Struggle. Approaches to rural landscapes in the history of Japanese documentary film”, The Sixties. A Journal of History, Politics and Culture, 28 Nov 2021, vol. 14, issue2, pp. 151-168.

Centeno, M. (2019). “Postwar Narratives through Avant-garde Documentary: Tokyo 1958 and Furyō Shōnen” in Lozano, Artur; Martínez, Dolores and Guarné, Blai (eds.), Persistently Postwar. Media and the Politics of Memory in Japan. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2019, pp. 41-62.

Centeno, M. (2018). "Deceiving ‘Primitivism’. Ainu people in 1910s Travelogues”, Annals of Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University, vol. 18, no1, June 2018.

 Centeno, M. (2018).”The Limits of Fiction in the Japanese Avant-Garde Documentary. The Case of Hōryūji”, Kokoro, no. 27, 2018, pp. 11-19 (Kokoro Journal Prize for the Dissemination of Japanese Culture 2018, awarded by a panel of professors from Japan, Europe and Latin America)

Centeno, M. (2018). 'The Limits of Fiction: Politics and Absent Scenes in Susumu Hani’s Bad Boys (Furyōshōnen, 1960)'. Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, vol.10, 2018, pp 1-15.

Centeno, M. (2018). “Contextualising N. G. Munro’s filming of the Ainu Bear Ceremony”, Japan Society Proceedings, no 154, 2018, pp. 90-106.

Centeno, M. (2017). “Gazes outside the Representation. Early Film Portrayals of the Ainu People", Orientalia Parthenopea, issue 17, 2017, pp. 189-210.

Centeno, M. (2017). “The Fight for the Self-Representation: Ainu Imaginary, Ethnicity and Assimilation”, Aphaville. Journal of Film and Screen Media, issue 13, 2017, pp. 69-89. No overlap.

 Centeno, M. (2015). “Forms of otherness: Representation of Ainu people in Benjamin Brodsky’s travelogues (1918-1919)”, Kokoro, Revista para la difusión de la cultura japonesa, nº 17, 2015, pp.14-22 (Kokoro Journal Prize for the Dissemination of Japanese Culture 2015 by a panel of professors from Japan, Spain and Latin America).

Centeno, M. (2015). Ainu. Pathways to Memory (2014, 82min). Documentary on the history of cultural assimilation of the Ainu people. Prizes: Best Full-length Documentary by National Museum of Anthropology and CSIC (The Spanish National Research Council, 2015); Best Film category of “Human Rights”, FICVI México 2014; Best Film category “Interculturality”, Cine Invisible Bilbao, Spain 2014; Best Foregin Director, Zlatna Ethnographic Film Festival, Romania, 2014; Audience Award Clam Festival, Barcelona, 2014; Special Mention Intimate Lens Film Documentary, Italy 2014.Selected in fifty international film festivals. 

Centeno, M. (2011). “Discovering Minorities in Japan: First Korean Representations in Japanese Cinema” in ACCS. The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies. Osaka, IAFOR, 2011, pp. 125-13