WILLIAM MAROTTI

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2001

Office: 5365 BUNCHE HALL
Phone: 310-825-4368
Fax: 310-206-9630
E-mail: marotti@history.ucla.edu

Mailing Address:

Class Websites

Field

Japan

Research Interests

William Marotti teaches modern Japanese history, with an emphasis on everyday life and cultural-historical issues. He received his doctorate in 2001 from the University of Chicago’s Department of East Asian Civilizations and Cultures, where he worked with Harry Harootunian, Tetsuo Najita, William Sibley, and Moishe Postone. William’s research interests in cultural and intellectual history and critical theory developed into a dissertation project on the cultural politics of avant-garde art and performance in 1960s Japan. Based at the University of Tokyo during 1996 and 1997, with grants from the Japan Foundation and the Japan Cultural Arts Foundation, he researched these evolving, interrelated forms of art, music, Butoh dance, photography, drama, and performance, and their relation to political contestation since the end of WWII in Japan.

Prior to joining the UCLA faculty, William participated from 2001 to 2003 in the Project on the Cold War as Global Conflict at New York University’s International Center for Advanced Studies (as a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow), and from 2003 to 2004 in the Expanding East Asian Studies project (ExEAS) of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. From 2004 to 2006, William taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History department at UC Santa Cruz.

William's current project is a book manuscript based on his dissertation. Money, Trains and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan is an investigation of the politics of culture and the everyday in postwar Japan, viewed through an analysis centered on transformations in avant-garde artistic production and performance. The book examines the advent of this art-based activism in Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s in its complex relation with an internationalized art world, mass culture, domestic protest movements, and evolving forms of state practice, law, and surveillance. It reflects upon the significance of this history for understanding the 1960s as a global moment, and the particular role of art and performance in these transformations.

William’s broader research interests include post-WWII Japan, global history, the 1960s, Cold War, comparability, critical theory, everyday life, art and politics, performance, law and legitimation, and protest movements.

Selected Publications

"Japan 1968: The Performance of Violence and the Theater of Protest," American Historical Review (February 2009): 97-135.

"Sounding the Everyday: the Music group and Tone Yasunao’s early work," Yasunao Tone Noise Media Language, ed. Brandon LaBelle, Errant Bodies Press, Los Angeles/Copenhagen, 2007.

"Political aesthetics: activism, everyday life, and art’s object in 1960's Japan,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 7, 4 (2006).

Simulacra and Subversion in the Everyday: Akasegawa Genpei's 1000-yen copy, critical art, and the State," Postcolonial Studies 4, 2 (July, 2001): 211-239

日本の1960年代前衛芸術運動と土方巽、即ち土方の舞踏を評価する諸問題Nihon no 1960 nendai zen`ei geijutsu undo to Hijikata Tatsumi, sunawachi Hijikata Tatsumi no buto o hyoka suru shomondai" [Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese Avant-garde art movements of the 1960s; Problems in Evaluating Hijikata Tatsumi's Butoh], Choreologia 24, (2001): 48-5.3.

Review: Concerned Theatre Japan The graphic art of Japanese theatre 1960-1980,by David G. Goodman. Journal of Asian Studies 58, 4 (November, 1999): 1140-2.


舞踏の問題性と本質主義の罠 "Buto no mondaisei to honshitsushugi no wana" (The problematics of Butoh and the essentialist trap), Shiataa Aatsu 8 (May 1997): 88-96.

60年代前衛芸術と土方巽 Rokuju nendai zen'ei geijutsu to Hijikata Tatsumi" (1960's Avant-Garde Art and Hijikata Tatsumi), Hijikata Tatsumi `98 Tsushin 2 (January 1998): 1.

From the Theatre Festival in Zagreb, Croatia," translation of Nishido Kojin, Kuroachia, zagurebu no engekisai kara," in Croatia 1996. Tourdays with Gekidan Kaitaisha, Miyauchi Tatsu, (Iokyo: Joho Senta shuppan-kyoku, 1997), 28.

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