Overview
Kimberly Hassel is a sociocultural anthropologist and digital ethnographer specializing in digital culture, youth culture, and identity in the contexts of Japan and its diasporas. She also specializes in Afro-Asia, with a particular focus on Afro-Japanese encounters in Black American popular culture and the Dominican Republic. Her current book project, tentatively titled Shaping the New Normal: Digital Belonging, Young Resilience, and Viral Times in Japan, examines the relationships between Social Networking Services, smartphones, and shifting notions of sociality and selfhood in Japan, especially among young people in the periods immediately prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Hassel’s examination of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on digital sociality in Japan and ethnographic methods on a broader scale has appeared in Anthropology News. Her research on instabae (Instagenic) culture and Instagram use among girls and young women as extensions of historical and ongoing forms of gendered socialities and worldmaking practices has been published in Mechademia. She also engages in public scholarship on the topic of digital culture and youth culture in transnational contexts, most recently for The Nation Magazine.
Dr. Hassel also specializes in diaspora studies, critical mixed race studies, and Afro-Japanese encounters. Her research has examined media portrayals of mixed-race identity in Japan vis-à-vis lived experience. Her work on digital activism among Black Japanese youths has appeared in “Who Is The Asianist?” The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies. In an ongoing collaborative project, Dr. Hassel explores transnational Black digital networks in the context of Japan, including consumption of Japanese popular culture among Black Americans and Gen Z more broadly. Her co-authored examination of representations of Blackness in Japan and Japanese popular culture, particularly pertaining to the Black African samurai Yasuke, has appeared in the commentary board of Critical Asian Studies. Dr. Hassel also presents and publishes on topics pertaining to positionality in academia, anthropology, and Japanese Studies, drawing upon her own experiences as a Dominican American ethnographer of Japan. For her second book project, she is examining the experiences of Dominican diasporic communities in Japan and Japanese diasporic communities in the Dominican Republic.
At Duke, Dr. Hassel teaches courses on Japanese popular culture, contemporary Japanese society through an anthropological lens, and critical digital studies. She is a faculty affiliate of the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, where she also serves as a co-organizer of the Triangle Korea/Japan Forum and member of the Digital Asia Research Cluster. She also serves as an advisory board member for the Humanities Research Center at Duke Kunshan University. Dr. Hassel was a research affiliate of the Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, Optimism (DISCO) Network (2023-2024) and a participant in the Cultivating Early Career Networks Between Global Asias and Japanese Studies program (2023-2025). Prior to joining Duke, she was an Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona (2022-2024).
Dr. Hassel received a PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University. She was the recipient of the Princeton University Marjorie Chadwick Buchanan Dissertation Prize. Her dissertation fieldwork was funded by a Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Doctoral Fellowship, which also supported one year as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia University. Dr. Hassel holds an MA in East Asian Studies from Princeton University and a BA in Japanese modified with Anthropology from Dartmouth College. She is a proud Afro-Latina, Dominican New Yorker and an alumna of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers. She is a former jazz musician and stand-up comic, and frequently incorporates performance in her pedagogy.
Note to PhD applicants: I am based in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, which does not have a PhD program. While I am unable to take PhD advisees for this reason, I am available to serve on internal and external PhD committees.
