Amy Obermeyer

Amy Obermeyer's research focuses on gender and literary subjectivity in Japanese and Latin American literature from the late-nineteenth through early-twentieth centuries, particularly as manifest in the Japanese shishôsetsu and modernismo in Latin America. Her dissertation, “Worlded Women: Women, Subjectivity, and World Literature in Turn-of-the-century Japan and Latin America,” addresses how the boom in women's writing that occurred contemporaneously in many literary markets around the world during the early-twentieth century was influenced by the global rise of liberalism, and how such works consequently evinced particular forms of subjectivity. A related article,  “Moving Mountains and Uprooting Weeds: Literary Subjectivity, First-wave Feminism, and Women’s Magazines in Latin America and Japan,” which addresses these questions in the context of early women's literary magazines, is forthcoming in late 2022 in Feminist Studies. She has also completed research on Nikkei communities in Latin America, and that work can be found under the title “Modern and Stateless: A Case Study of the International, Racialised Modernity of the Peruvian Nikkei in Seiichi Higashide’s Adios to Tears'' in The Journal of Intercultural Studies. Amy has received fellowships from the Japan Foundation and the NYU Center for the Humanities in support of this research. She has previously been a postdoctoral fellow with the NYU Core College Curriculum, as well as a fellowships advisor at NYU’s Office of Global Awards. Prior to graduate school, Amy had a career in child welfare, serving first as a crisis counselor and then with child protective services. She is additionally a founding member of the editorial board of Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism and Translation, where she serves as co-managing editor.