Horiguchi, Noriko J.
Noriko J. Horiguchi
Noriko J. Horiguchi (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she serves as Chair of the Japanese Program and Director of the UT Japan Center (launching Fall 2026). She is President of the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (SEC/AAS).
Her research engages modern and contemporary Japanese literature and culture at the intersections of gender, empire, and material culture, with particular attention to the ways in which everyday objects and practices become freighted with ideological meaning.
Horiguchi is the author of Women Adrift: The Literature of Japan’s Imperial Body (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), a study of how women writers navigated and negotiated the boundaries of nation and gender under colonial conditions — asserting their own agency while, paradoxically, contributing to the expansion of the Japanese imperial body. The book generated wide recognition and led to invited lectures in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan, including at the University of California, Berkeley; the Library of Congress; the University of Cambridge; the University of Oxford; the University of London; and Ochanomizu University.
She is currently completing her second monograph, Milk and the Making of Modern Japan, which traces the cultural and ideological transformations of milk — both bovine and human — across modern Japanese history: from its introduction as a technology of imperial bodies to its postwar reinvention as a symbol of prosperity and purity, and its contemporary renegotiation in feminist literary imagination. Related work appears in “The Devouring Empire: Food and Memory in Hayashi Fumiko’s Wartime Narratives and Naruse Mikio’s Films,” in Devouring Japan: Global Perspectives on Japanese Culinary Identity, ed. Nancy K. Stalker (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Horiguchi has held visiting appointments at leading institutions in Japan and the United States, including the University of Tokyo (2019, 2007), Kyoto University (2016), Kobe University (2025, 2023, 2014), and the University of Pennsylvania (2009–2010).
Her teaching spans modern and contemporary Japanese literature, film, and culture, including courses on food, fiction, and film in modern Japan (JAPA 314); contemporary Japanese fiction and film (JAPA/CNST 315); upper-division Japanese reading (JAPA 452); and Business Japanese (JAPA 365). Her teaching was profiled in The Daily Beacon in 2015.
Horiguchi is an active contributor to public and institutional dialogue on Japan-related topics. In 2019, she gave a radio interview on WUOT’s Changing Course on the intersections of Japanese culture, economy, and politics in Tennessee on the occasion of Consul General Hiroyuki Kobayashi’s visit to UT.
