Graduate Student Directory

Research Interests

Jane's research is concerned with Japanese Canadian knowledges to do with food, land, and “nature.” She is especially interested in what these knowledges offer in terms of a critique of the settler colonial, capitalist contexts in which they were produced. Jane’s dissertation unfolds through investigations of cultural practices and labor histories that relate groups of immigrants and settlers to indigenous peoples, people to land, and culture to nature. 

Biography, Education and Training

Jane Komori is a PhD student in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. She holds a Bachelor of Arts First Class with Distinction in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies and humanities from Simon Fraser University and is a Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada doctoral fellow. 

Jane’s work has been published Ricepaper Magazine, Currents: A Ricepaper Anthology, Matrix Magazine, and GUTS Canadian Feminist Magazine, The Bulletin/Geppo. She is coauthor of a book written in collaboration with the Tonari Gumi Japanese Community Volunteers Association, Our Edible Roots: The Japanese Canadian Kitchen Garden. 

Honors, Awards and Grants

2020—Fellow, Social Sciences and Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Program, The Humanities Institute

2019—Outstanding Teaching Assistant, History of Consciousness, University of California Santa Cruz

2019—Graduate Student Travel Grant, Association of Asian American Studies

2018-2022—Doctoral Fellow, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

2018—Summer Research Fellow, The Humanities Institute

2017—Robert C. Brown Award, Simon Fraser University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences 

Selected Publications

Forthcoming: "The United States right at the center of the action: Review of Mark Driscoll's The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven." Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences. Fall 2021. 

"Matsutake, pine mushroom, or qámes?" The Bulletin/Geppo. September 2019. 

"Alien Histories: Yomogi and the 70th Anniversary of Japanese Canadians' Return to the West Coast." The Bulletin/Geppo. December 2018. 

Our Edible Roots: The Japanese Canadian Kitchen Garden. Tonari Gumi Japanese Community Volunteers Association. 2018.

Selected Presentations

 “I Look Nature.” 2019 Association of Asian American Studies 39th Conference. University of Wisconsin—Madison. 25-27 April 2019.

 “‘I Look Nature’: Japanese Canadian Gardens in Settler Colonial Ecologies.” ANIMAL.LIT: Japanese Environmental Humanities Graduate Conference and Master Classes. University of California Irvine’s Anza Borrego Desert Research Center. 10-13 December 2018.

"Yellow Vein Virus, Rhizomania, and Sugar Beets: Spectral Sweetness and Yellow Peril in Western Canadian Agricultural Histories." Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association 116th Annual Conference. University of Western Washington. 9-11 November 2018.

“Invasive, Indigenous, and Interstitial Species: Yomogi Spectrality on Unceded Coast Salish Terriories.” Critical Ethnic Studies Association Conference: Critical Insurrections: Decolonizing Difficulties, Activist Imaginaries, and Collective Possibilities. University of British Columbia. 21-24 June 2018. 

“‘You humans always make a mess of things': The Ghostly-Melancholic and Spirited Eating in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.” QTRG Spring Conference: Futures of Queer Theory. University of California Irvine. 11 May 2018.

“Rooted Labor: Intergenerational Food Production Knowledge.” SEEDBED: A Soil Symposium. University of California Santa Cruz. 26-27 April 2018.