Professor, Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations

Ayako Kano is a cultural historian specializing in the history of gender and performance in Japan, with broad interests in all aspects of the humanities and arts in the world. Her early education includes a German kindergarten, Japanese elementary school, and public high school in suburban New York. With an undergraduate degree in English literature from Keio University, and MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, she has been teaching at the University of Pennsylvania since 1995. Her affiliations at Penn include the Graduate Groups in Comparative Literature, History, History of Art, and she is a core faculty member in the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program. She is currently working on a book on fiction to film adaptations in modern Japan. She is the author of Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor (2016) and Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (2001), and the co-editor of Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (2018) as well as articles and translations on related topics.