Ayako Kano, professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, has been appointed as director of the Wolf Humanities Center. Professor Kano is a cultural historian specializing in the history of gender and performance in Japan and has been teaching at Penn since 1995. Her affiliations 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 the author of numerous books, including Rethinking Japanese Feminisms and Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor.

Professor Kano joins the Wolf Humanities Center as it begins its 2025–2026 Forum on Truth. She was previously a Penn Faculty Fellow during the then Penn Humanities Forum's 2011–2012 Forum on Adaptations and 2014–2015 Forum on Color, and director of the Center's Undergraduate Humanities Forum in 2018–2019 and 2019–2020.

Associate Dean for Arts and Letters Josephine Park said of Kano's appointment, "Ayako Kano is a renowned scholar of Japanese feminism whose work spans a wide range of cultural texts. Professor Kano is a vital presence on campus: her workshops on feminism are lively, generative spaces, and she is a legendary mentor to students and colleagues across the humanities at SAS. She has a gift for sustaining intellectual communities—and then there is her writing bootcamp! She has spurred so many of us to get cracking on our work, and I know she will be an inspirational force for the Wolf Humanities Center."

Professor Kano was spotlighted in OMNIA’s Origin Stories series in April 2024.