EDUCATION
Elyssa Faison received a B.A. in History and East Asian Studies from Oberlin College in 1988, after which she spent eighteen months as a Japanese Ministry of Education (now the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Research Scholar in the Sociology Department (Faculty of Letters) of Nagoya University. At Nagoya, she undertook a comparative study of the political history of the Taisho Democracy Movement of the 1910s and 20s and the Anti U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty Movement of 1960. Upon returning to the United States in 1990, she moved to Boston and took a staff position in the East Asian Legal Studies Program of the Harvard Law School. In 1992 she began graduate studies in Japanese history at UCLA, where she received an M.A. in 1994 and a Ph.D. (under the direction of Professors Miriam Silverberg and Fred Notehelfer) in 2001.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
After working as a Teaching Assistant and Teaching Associate at UCLA for courses in Chinese history, Japanese history, World history and Women’s Studies, Faison began a one-year position as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus teaching Japanese history at the undergraduate and graduate levels. She joined the faculty of the University of Oklahoma as an Assistant Professor in 2000. She was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Yale Council on East Asian Studies for 2003-2004, during which time she taught an undergraduate seminar called “Remembering Wartime in Japan” geared toward East Asian Studies majors at Yale. This course was taught for the first time at OU during spring semester 2005 as a History/International and Area Studies capstone class, and was selected by OU President David Boren as part of the inaugural group of OU Presidential “Dream” Courses. The “Dream” course designation provides funding to invite to OU experts and specialists in the topic of the course from across the U.S. and around the world. These experts participate in one class session each as special guest instructors, and offer public lectures at OU during their visit.
RESEARCH IN JAPAN
Faison’s first visit to Japan was a nine-month junior year abroad program during college as a participant in the Associated Kyoto Program, where she studied at Doshisha University. After returning from Kyoto and graduating from Oberlin College, she spent eighteen months as a Research Scholar at Nagoya University. From 1996 to 1998 Faison conducted her dissertation research in Tokyo as a Visiting Scholar at The Ohara Institute for Social Research, located at Hosei University’s Tama campus. At the Ohara Institute, Faison worked with former Institute Director and Japanese labor historian Professor Nimura Kazuo. She also worked closely with Japanese literature specialist Professor Kawamura Minato at the main campus of Hosei University located in Ichigaya, Tokyo. These two years of study were made possible by a Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellowship and a Title VI Foreign Language and Area Studies award. Additional research trips to Japan during the summer of 2002 and the spring of 2004 were funded by grants from The University of Oklahoma, the Yale Council on East Asian Studies, and the Northeast Asia Coordinating Council of the Association for Asian Studies.
CURRENT RESEARCH AND PUBLICATIONS
Faison’s first book, Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan, was published by the University of California Press in late 2007. She is co-editor with Dr. Ruth Barraclough (Australian National University) of Sexing Class: Gender and Labor in Korea and Japan, which will be published by Routledge in 2009. She has also begun work on a second monograph on the history of citizenship in Japan from the time of the Meiji Restoration through the immediate postwar period focusing on the family registration system.