Christopher Born

Biography

As a graduate student, he received a Japan Foundation Dissertation Fellowship to conduct research from 2015-2016 at the University of Tokyo and the University of Hokkaido, culminating in his dissertation “Native Roots and Foreign Grafts: The Spiritual Quest of Uchimura Kanzō.” This study examines the literary worldview of the Christian intellectual Uchimura Kanzō, the nature of his autobiographical writings, and the influence he exerted upon a generation of important authors and thinkers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Prior to joining the faculty at Belmont, Dr. Born was a lecturer at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Missouri–St. Louis. From 2017-2018, he served as a Visiting Professor of Asian Studies at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. In addition to teaching courses on Japanese language and literature, Dr. Born received grants from Japan Foundation and the Mellon Foundation to host a symposium at Bowdoin entitled “Godzilla as Harrier and Harbinger: Rethinking the Post-Atomic in the Pacific.”

At Belmont, Dr. Born is an Assistant Professor and teaches courses in Asian Studies and Japanese language. Since 2023, he has been leading study abroad courses in Japan, helping students explore traditional arts and contemporary culture in Japan.

Dr. Born’s research interests include subjectivity and the autobiographical mode in modern Japanese literature, the Christian heritage in Japan, Japanese aesthetics and architectural spaces, the global influence of early modern Japanese woodblock prints, and the philosophical underpinnings of anime and manga. He is the author of “In the Footsteps of the Master: Confucian Values in Anime and Manga” (AsiaNetwork Exchange, Vol. XVII, No. 1, Fall 2009) <link this to : à >https://www.asianetworkexchange.org/article/id/7714/ wherein he examines how traditional values are re-envisioned in recent shōnen anime and manga. His most recent publication “Change Unchanging: Mediating the Sacred Spaces of Ise Grand Shrines over Time”

https://brill.com/display/book/9789004510555/BP000020.xml (use this link for the title here) in

Elliott and Heath, eds. Art, Architecture and the Moving Viewer, c. 300-1500 CE, (Leiden: Brill, 2022). With an eye on the political changes and spiritual innovation, by tracing who had access to the space in the medieval period—both physical and imagined—this work examines how the changing physical, yet unchanging spiritual environment of the Ise shrine over time affected the viewer’s reception of and participation in the sacralized space.