Ayako Kano was appointed as the new director of the Wolf Humanities Center.
Kano currently serves as a professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and specializes in the intersection of gender, performance, and politics, as well as in Japanese cultural history. She has been a faculty member at Penn since 1995.
“Ayako Kano is a renowned scholar of Japanese feminism whose work spans a wide range of cultural texts,” Associate Dean for Arts and Letters Josephine Park said in the announcement. “Professor Kano is a vital presence on campus: her workshops on feminism are lively, generative spaces, and she is a legendary mentor to students and colleagues across the humanities at SAS.”
Kano’s previous positions include an appointment as a Penn Faculty Fellow during the 2011-12 Forum on Adaptations and 2014-15 Forum on Color as well as the director of the Wolf Humanities Center’s Undergraduate Humanities Forum during the 2018-19 and 2019-20 academic years.
She joins the Wolf Humanities Center as it begins its Forum on Truth during the 2025-26 academic year.
“In the 2025-2026 academic year, the Wolf Humanities Center will embark on a journey to explore the multifaceted challenges involved in recognizing, defining, and grappling with both absolute and relative notions of truth,” the center’s website read. “Through a series of lectures, workshops, performances, exhibitions, and field trips, the Center aims to foster a stimulating intellectual and artistic environment for reflection and discussion, where humanities-oriented scholars, students, and the public will come together to ponder the ontological significance of truth.”
Kano’s research works include “Rethinking Japanese Feminisms,” which analyzed the first generation of actresses in modern Japanese theater, and “Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor,” which examined Japanese feminist debates from the 1890s to the present.
In 2024, Kano was featured in the “Origin Stories” series by Omnia, the School of Arts and Sciences magazine. In the installment, she discussed her love of music, family, and vision of scholarship.
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She is currently working on a book on cinematic adaptations of Japanese literature as well as a translation project of a popular text from the early modern period.
“[Kano] has a gift for sustaining intellectual communities — and then there is her writing bootcamp!” Park added. “She has spurred so many of us to get cracking on our work, and I know she will be an inspirational force for the Wolf Humanities Center.”
