Michael Kushell
Department of Music
mkushell [at] fas.harvard.edu
Michael Kushell is a graduate student in Ethnomusicology who works on diverse forms of music, dance, theater, and ritual in Japan. He earned a B.A. in Music from U.C. Berkeley, and before coming to Harvard spent three years researching, performing, and living in Japan, one of which was supported by a Fulbright grant (2010-11). His planned dissertation and capstone project (which is currently imagined as a collaborative audiovisual endeavor) both continue this previous work, which explores phenomenologies of performance, the politics of “preservation,” and discourses of the body, rurality, and nationality as they intersect in the contemporary revival of a regional, amateur form of kabuki theater in Central Japan.