Jyana S. Browne

Jyana S. Browne’s areas of research include Japanese puppetry; the interactions of new technologies with traditional theatre; and the intersections of performance, sexuality, and embodiment on stage and in everyday life. Her current book project examines performances of love suicide in Osaka’s eighteenth-century puppet theatres. Dr. Browne earned her doctorate from the University of Washington in 2017. As part of her graduate work, she spent a year studying at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (IUC) with the support of a Blakemore Freeman Fellowship and a year engaging in dissertation research at Waseda University with the support of a Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellowship. She has published her research in Journal of Japanese Language and Literature, Puppetry International, Theatre Research International, and Dai 37 kai kokusai nihon bungaku kenkyūshūkai kaigiroku. She also has chapters in several edited volumes, including Troubling Traditions: Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the US and Realisms in East Asian Performance. In 2024, she co-edited a special "Notes from the Field" section of Theatre Topics titled "Internationalizing the US Academy: Perspectives from Theatre and Performance Studies. 

In March 2024, Dr. Browne collaborated on the symposium Techno-Futures, a three-day event of film screenings, artist talks, and research presentations on the intersections of new technologies and perfomance in East Asia and Asian diasporas. Her collaboration with Tarryn Chun (University of Notre Dame) and Van Tran Nguyen (Georgetown University) continues as they develop an edited volume, a short documentary, and a website to share the research from the symposium more widely.

Dr. Browne was the recipient of an Elevate Fellowship from the Teaching and Learning Transformation Center for 2020. Her course offerings include Performance and Sexuality in Early Modern Japan, Mapping Premodern Japan, The Supernatural and the Strange in Classical Japan, and Technologies of Japanese Performance. She also teaches courses that train advanced language students in classical Japanese language and culture and in reading authentic works of fiction and nonfiction in modern Japanese.

Before beginning her graduate studies, Dr. Browne worked as a theatre director in New York. She directed plays from the noh and bunraku repertoires in addition to plays by American artists, such as Katori Hall and Lucas Hnath. During graduate school, she spent two years supporting the Mellon Creative Research Fellowships at the University of Washington. Dr. Browne has trained in the traditional Japanese art of chanting for the puppet theatre (gidayū bushi) under Takemoto Koshikyō and in tea ceremony with Yamazaki Tomiko in Yokohama.