Alice Baldock

Alice Baldock is the Okinaga Junior Research Fellow in Japanese Studies at Wadham College for academic years 2023-26. Her research interests include 20th century Japanese history, gender in postwar Japan and the transnational circulation of ideas around ‘the body’.

Her doctoral research at Wolfson College, Oxford, focused on the intellectual views of a group of dancers in the mid-20th century regarding the body (especially nikutai, or flesh body) and movement. In this research she also showed how dancers reframed post-war Japanese society in a way that allowed them to live more authentically in a world that was becoming increasingly codified and consumerist.

Her current research involves tracing the and the transnational circulation and reception of this body of knowledge, to see how and why these ideas about the body - that involved a complete eradication of hierarchies of gender, ability, and class, became so popular in Japan and then across the world.

Her recent publications include ‘Body (of) Knowledge: Women, the Body, and Dance in Twentieth Century Japan’ (Journal of Asian Studies, January 2022), ‘Selling Bodies in the Age of the Flesh: Bodies, Dance, and Postwar Japan’ (The Routledge History of Sex Work Around the World, forthcoming), and the foreword to dancer Vangeline’s first book, Cradling Empty Space (2020).

Alice also has a creative practice, with recent work including an appearance in Nakajima Natsu’s Yume no yume, oku no oku, nokori no hi (April 2022) and a solo piece in butoh company Mutekisha’s Kokkyounaki Karada (July 2022), and participation in several artist residencies in the UK. She is also interested in integrating performing arts and humanities into a useful dialogue, most recently by co-organising the international conference ‘Missing Bodies, Missing Voices: Ordinary Lives and the Reframing of Postwar Japan’ at St Antony’s College, Oxford (March 2023), which brought scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners from around the world into conversation.

She has also previously collaborated with TORCH and butoh company Café Reason on the project ‘Breaking Free: A Symposium on the Dancing Body’, which combined creative practice, discussion, and writing to interrogate various ideas that form our lived experiences of our bodies.