Research Expertise and Interest

20th century avant-gardes, Japanese literature, film, theater and dance, East Asia, media theory, contemporary art, critical theory, gender theory, memory studies

Research Description

Miryam Sas (Ph.D, Yale) is Professor of Comparative Literature and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of She is the author of Feeling Media: Potentiality and the Afterlife of Art (Duke University Press, 2022),  Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard University Press, 2010) and Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford UP, released in 2001).  She has written numerous articles in English, French, and Japanese on subjects such as Japanese futurism, intermedia art, experimental animation, pink film, cross-cultural performance, and butoh dance.  She is currently working on a book on media theory and contemporary art in Japan, Media Acts: Infrastructure, Potentiality, and the Afterlife of Art in Japan.

Awards include President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities, grants from the Mellon Foundation, Japan Foundation, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Seikei University Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, Sumitomo Foundation, Berkeley’s Center for Japanese Studies and Arts Research Center. Sas serves as a reviewer for numerous presses and for journals of Asian and Japanese studies, cultural studies, art history, film and media, and comparative literature, and for fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Before moving to Berkeley, she was an assistant professor at Harvard University.

Selected Publications           

Feeling Media: Potentiality, and the Afterlife of Art in Japan, Duke University Press, November 2022.

Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011).

Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford University Press, 1999 (released 2001).

In progress: Finding Zbaraż  [narrative nonfiction]

In progress: Gender, Realism, and Media.