Carolyn Birdsall (バードソール・キャロリン,アムステルダム大学) is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and Vice-Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Her research is situated in the fields of sound studies, radio/media studies, archival studies, and urban studies. Her recent monograph, Radiophilia (Bloomsbury, 2023), proposes a transmedial and transnational approach to radio, both past and present. During her recent NWO-funded project on early radio archives, she published several articles that examine Japanese radio history and its archival and infrastructural traces in the present day.
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Chiharu Chujo (中條千晴, ジャン・ムーラン・リヨン第3大学) is Associate Professor at the University of Lyon 3, specializing in gender and popular music in contemporary Japan. Her research explores gender-based violence in music, ecofeminism and music, as well as the representation, agency, and materiality of gender in hip-hop and electronic music. She has published several articles in these fields and has also translated Femmes du jazz by Marie Buscatto into Japanese.
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Jeremy Corral (コーラル・ジェレミー, ボルドー・モンテーニュ大学) is Associate Professor of Japanese Studies at Bordeaux Montaigne University. His research involves the history of contemporary Japanese music and social representations of popular music. He is the author of Japanoise: Extrémismes et entropie (2019), a publication on Japanese noise music that examines the process of constructing formal characteristics and culturalist discourses on noise music, using Japanese practitioners as a focal point. His research currently focuses on the early years of Japanese electroacoustic music, exploring intellectual exchanges between Japanese, European, and American composers and sound engineers, as well as the processes of popularization and circulation of electronic sound.
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Kerstin Fooken (フォーケン・ケアスティン, ハンブルク大学) is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Hamburg. Coming from a background in Japanese film history with an interest in gender, her research has focussed on women in Japanese silent and early sound film as well as their role in the intermedial practices with early sound media like radio and gramophone records in the interwar years. Her current research interest lies in the intersection of sound, voice and gender in Japan. She is a Steering Committee member of the Kataoka Collection Research Group, examining Japanese historical gramophone records related to film and popular sound culture. Her sound-related research has been published as articles and book chapters exploring ways to use historic sound media in the field of Japanese Studies.
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Andrea Giolai (ジョライ・アンドレア,ライデン大学) is Assistant Professor (UD) of Ethnography and Performing Arts of Japan at Leiden University. His research focuses on the anthropology and ethnography of Japan, with a strong emphasis on sound as a medium for art and as a cultural artifact. He works on Japanese court music and dance (Gagaku), the reconstruction of ancient musical notations and instruments, and, recently, sound loss and environmental change. A project he led with funding from the Dutch Research Council resulted in Thresh+Hold (2024), a collective multimodal report featured in “Field/Works II”, an online exhibition hosted by the European Association of Social Anthropologists. He co-edited Textual Heritage (Berghahn Books, 2025) with Edoardo Gerlini and has authored multiple journal articles and book chapters.
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Iris Haukamp (ハウカンプ・イリス, 東京外国語大学) is Associate Professor in Japanese Film at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, working on transnational filmmaking, technological transformations, and innovative practices in Japanese cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. She has published a monograph and multiple articles and book chapters in the field. Her current work explores how sound technologies reshape cinematic representation and cultural understanding, focussing on the intersections of film and theatre at the threshold to sound film and how both practices impacted Japanese film conventions. With Martyn Smith, she co-founded the Asian Sound Cultures project, which so far has produced a co-edited volume Asian Sound Cultures: Voice, Noise, Sound, Technology (2023) and two international conferences.
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Makiko Sadakata (貞方マキ子, アムステルダム大学) is an Assistant Professor in the Musicology Department at the University of Amsterdam. She is affiliated with the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation (ILLC). Currently, she coordinates the Music Studies master’s program. Her background includes music composition, psychology, and cognitive science, with a special focus on how music and language connect. Having been born and raised in Japan and now living in the Netherlands, her research often compares Eastern (Japanese) and Western (European) perspectives. This approach helps to reveal important and cultural insights into how we perceive, create, and appreciate sounds.
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Oliver Seibt (ザイブト・オリヴァー, アムステルダム大学) is Assistant Professor (UD) of Cultural Musicology at the University of Amsterdam. He is author of Der Sinn des Augenblicks: Überlegungen zu einer Musikwissenschaft des Alltäglichen (“The Meaning of the Moment: Reflections on a Musicology of the Everyday”, Bielefeld 2010) and co-editor of the volume Made in Germany (2020) in the “Routledge Global Popular Music” series and the forthcoming Kompendium Musikethnologie in the “Kompendien Musik” series of the German Society for Music Research (GfM).
Seibt’s research focuses on everyday life music studies and (the globalization of) Japanese popular music. He has published several articles on the domestication of “Western” popular music by Japanese artists and the global spread of Japanese visual-kei. His current research investigates transitionality as a musical affordance using City Pop, AI Hibari, and jazu kissa as case studies.
Seibt was co-founder and general secretary of the German-speaking branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-D-A-CH). Since September 2019 he has been chair and now member-at-large of the board of the Benelux branch of IASPM.
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Martyn Smith (スミス・マーティン, シェフイールド大学) is a Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at The University of Sheffield. His first monograph Mass Media, Consumerism and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Bloomsbury, 2018) examined the rise of the mass media in postwar Japan in relation to nationalism and national identity. From February 2023- to February 2025, he was UK AHRC Research, Development, and Engagement Fellow working on the project Sound Recording Consumerism and National Identity, which explores the history of the notion of the soundscape in Japan.
Smith’s recent publications include ‘Sound hunting in postwar Japan: recording technology, aurality, mobility, and consumerism’ (Sound Studies, 2021), the chapter ‘“The Hell of Modern sound”: a history of urban noise in modern Japan’ in Asian Sound Cultures: Voice, Noise, Sound, Technology (2023), and ‘The “hedonistic revolution of everyday life”: Men’s magazines, consumerism and the Japanese salaryman in the 1960s’ (East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, 2022). With Dr Iris Haukamp he created the Asian Sound Cultures and Modernity Project which has so far organised two international conferences, several international workshops, and published one edited volume, Asian Sound Cultures: Voice, Noise, Sound, Technology (2023).
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