Dear SSJ members,

The School of Human Sciences (HUS) of Osaka University is pleased to announce two upcoming Guest Lectures to be held online via Zoom and in person at the School of Human Sciences, Room M44. To join us, please register athttps://forms.gle/efgH55kRkg2mKdUq7

June 1st (Wed) 2022, 1:30 pm-3 pm JST Dr Bixia Chen of the University of the Ryukyus. Dr Chen will present a paper titled Women, Spirituality, and Plants in Okinawa. Dr Chen's lecture focuses on the cultural implications of sacred sites in Okinawa by interrelating the study of their natural vegetation with women's rituals, shading light on the lives of such women ritual performers.

June 8th (Wed) 2022, 1:30 pm-3 pm JST Dr Dana Mirsalis of Harvard University will present a paper titled Two Stories of the Gendered Priesthood in Postwar Japan. Dr Mirsalis will examine two narratives about the gendered Shinto priesthood in postwar Japan by looking at how they adapt, reinterpret, or ignore Jinja Honchō's directives in order to carve out space for themselves.

These guest lectures are organised by Dr Paola Cavaliere (pcavaliere@hus.osaka-u.ac.jp) of the Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University. They are part of the Women and Religion in Contemporary Japan course, which explores how intersecting the study of gender, religion and spirituality with their socio-cultural, political and economic contexts opens the door to a wealth of new knowledge we can continue to build. We encourage students, researchers and scholars within and outside Osaka University to join us and engage in meaningful conversations with Dr Chen and Dr Mirsalis, and stimulate further investigation of women's experience of religion and spirituality in contemporary Japan in the future.