Jennifer Robertson is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has a “dry” appointment as Professor of Women's Studies and is a faculty associate in the Anthropology/History Program.

She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University in 1985, where she also earned a B.A. in the History of Art in 1975. Robertson was an Invited Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1996-97).

Robertson is the originator and General Editor of Colonialisms, a new book series from the University of California Press. The Colonialisms series of books aims to explore the historical realities, current significance, and future ramifications of imperialist practices with origins and boundaries outside of "the West," including transnational corporations and cyberspace. Authors in the series emphasize the cultural, practical, experiential, affective, and aesthetic strategies of imperialist agendas and colonialist projects. The series also hopes to stimulate the development of theories and methodologies that may disrupt the all too easy binaries of East and West, North and South, colonizer and colonized. (www.ucpress.edu/books/COL.ser.html)

She has published many articles and book chapters on a wide spectrum of subjects ranging from the 17th century to the present, including nativist and social rectification movements, agrarianism, sex and gender systems and ideologies, mass and popular culture, nostalgia and internationalization, the place of Japan in American Anthropology, sexuality and suicide, theater and performance, votive and folk art, imperialism and colonialism and eugenics and bioethics. Her work has also been translated into German, Finnish, French, and Japanese.

Robertson is currently writing and editing articles and books on the cultural history of Japanese eugenic colonialism, eugenics and bioethics in Japan today, and the genre of war art. Although her primary area specialty is Japan, Robertson has also worked in Sri Lanka and is presently working in Israel.

Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Univ. of California Press, 1998; 2nd ptg. 1999; 3rd ptg. 2001) 1999 Kurt Weill Prize; 1998 Ruth Benedict Prize.

Odoru teikokushugi: Takarazuka ni miru kindai Nihon no sei to bunka no shokuminchifu (Dancing Imperialism: The Colonization of Sex and Culture in Modern Japan as Framed by the Takarazuka Revue) (Tokyo: Gendai Shokan, 2000). Japanese translation of Takarazuka (1998) by Chieko Hori with the assistance of Jennifer Robertson.

Editor, Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader (Blackwell 2004)

Editor, A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan (Blackwell 2005)

1995 "Mon Japon: The Revue Theater as a Technology of Japanese Imperialism." American Ethnologist 22(4):970-996

1997 "Empire of Nostalgia: Rethinking 'Internationalization' in Japan Today." Theory, Culture and Society 14(4):97-122

1998 "When and Where Japan Enters: American Anthropology, 1945 to the Present." pp. 295-335. Helen Hardacre, ed., Postwar Development of Japanese Studies. New York: E.J. Brill

1999 "Dying to Tell: Sexuality and Suicide in Imperial Japan." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25(1):1-36

2001 “Les Bataillons Fértiles: Sexe et la Citoyenneté dans le Japon Impérial” (Fertile-Womb Battalions: Sex and Citizenship in Imperial Japan), pp. 275-301, 550-552. (Bernard Bernier and Vincent Merza, trans.) Livia Monnet, ed., Approches critiques de la pensée japonaise du XXe siècle/Critical Readings in Twentieth-Century Japanese Thought. Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal.

2001 "Japan’s First Cyborg?: Miss Nippon, Eugenics, and Wartime Technologies of Beauty, Body, and Blood.” Body and Society 7(1):1-34

2002 “Reflexivity Redux: A Pithy Polemic on ‘Positionality’.” Anthropological Quarterly 75 (4):755-762.

2002 “Blood Talks: Eugenic Modernity and the Creation of New Japanese.” History and Anthropology 13 (3): 191-216

2005 “Dehistoricizing History: The Ethical Dilemma of ‘East Asian Bioethics’.” Critical Asian Studies 37(2) June: 233-250.

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