Paul Roquet
Associate Professor of Media Studies and Japan Studies
Mitsui Career Development Professor in Contemporary Technology
Comparative Media Studies / Writing
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Education
2012 PhD, Japanese Language, Designated Emphasis in Film Studies, University of California, Berkeley
2007 MA, Japanese Language, University of California, Berkeley
2003 BA, Asian Studies/Media Studies, Pomona College
Academic Positions
2022- Associate Professor (with tenure), Media Studies and Japan Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Comparative Media Studies / Writing
2019-2022 Associate Professor (without tenure), Media Studies and Japan Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Comparative Media Studies / Writing
2018-2019 Associate Professor (without tenure) of Japanese Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Global Studies and Languages
2016-2018 Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Global Studies and Languages
2015-2016 Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Media and Film Studies, Brown University, Modern Culture and Media
2012-2015 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, Stanford University, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Fellowships and Honors
2017-2023 Mitsui Career Development Professor in Contemporary Technology, MIT
2018-2019 Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Research Fellow – Long Term, Tokyo University of the Arts
2011 Center for Japanese Studies Fellow, UC Berkeley
2009-2010 Fulbright IIE Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellow, Rikkyō University (Tokyo)
2009 Graduate Fellow in Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts, Arts Research Center, UC Berkeley
2008 Center for Japanese Studies Fellow, UC Berkeley
2007 Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow, Intermediate Hindi, South Asian Summer Language Program, University of Wisconsin, Madison
2005-2010 Regents Intern Fellow, UC Berkeley
2005-2008 Townsend Discovery Fellow, Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley
2003-2004 Thomas J. Watson Fellow (multi-country research project): “Acoustic Ecology: Sound and Society in the Cook Islands, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Canada”
Talks
April 2023 "Ambient Capture: Platforming Atmospherics from YouTube to the Metaverse." University of Utah
March 2023 "Mapping the Metaverse Land Grab in East Asia." Association for Asian Studies, Boston
March 2023 "The Background Fantastic: Ambient Fantasy from YouTube to the Metaverse." Figure Ground Media lecture series, Princeton University
March 2023 "Selective Embodiment in the Retreat to the Metaverse." Translating Embodiedness Symposium (Part 2), London
November 2022 "没入的囲い込み：日本のバーチャルリアリティを考える." 日本メディア学会 (Japan Association for Media, Journalism, and Communication Studies), Okinawa
July 2022 "Presence and Absence at the Virtual Market." DiGRA 2022, Warsaw
June 2022 "Dis-Intercorporeality: On the Unresponsiveness of the Virtual Body." Translating Embodiedness Symposium, Durham University
April 2022 "The Immersive Enclosure: Japanese Virtual Reality and the Privatization of Presence." Reischauer Institute Japan Forum, Harvard University
April 2022 "Placing Virtual Reality: Japan’s Alternative VR History." Discovery Lecture Series, Harvard University
April 2022 "The Nauseous Interface: A Cultural History of Moving Image Motion Sickness." Society for Cinema and Media Studies
March 2021 "VR as a Social Enclosure." Society for Cinema and Media Studies
December 2020 "Ambience In and Around the Virtual Reality Headset." 4th International Conference on Ambiances, UC Santa Barbara
October 2020 "Automating Perception in Japanese VR." Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs
February 2020 "The Circular Ruins: Isolation and Afterlife in Japanese VR,” Contemporary Japanese Thought speaker series, Cornell University
February 2020 "Confronting a Spatial Computing Future in Japan’s VR Visual Novels,” keynote lecture, Imagining Our Digital Futures conference, University of Sheffield
October 2019 "The Animation Enclosure: VR Visual Novels and the Space Around the Face." Animate Assembly, University of London, Birkbeck
August 2019 "Mediating Japan's Labor Shortage with VR Telepresence." University of East Anglia
March 2019 “The Telepresence Enclosure: Virtual Reality and Demographic Change in Japan,” The Chinese University of Hong Kong
December 2018 "The Ethics of Atmosphere,” Atmospheres in the Urban Anthropocene workshop, Aarhus School of Architecture
September 2018 “From Headphones to the Head-Mounted Display: Towards an Audiocentric History of Media Immersion,” Sound Culture Studies and Modernity in Asia Conference, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
July 2018 “Japan’s Mixed Realities: Urbanizing AR/VR,” Beijing Normal University Media/Anime/Digital Industries Summer School, Tokyo University of the Arts
July 2018 “Peripheral Visions: Ambient Media from Muzak to Mixed Reality,” Tokyo University of the Arts
April 2018 “VR in Japan: Anime Bodies, Algorithmic Worlds,” keynote lecture for Japan Week, Brown University
March 2018 “Living with Ambient Computation in Japanese VR Narratives,” and chair of “VR Aesthetics: Immersion and Empathy” panel, Society for Cinema and Media Studies
February 2018 “Mixed Realism and Composited Violence in the Light Novel/LitRPG,” Association for Japanese Literary Studies, Oberlin College
October 2017 “IoT Portals, Ubiquity, and the Ambient Power Play,” Porting Media II, Concordia University
March 2017 “Desktop Reveries: Hand, Software, and the Space of Japanese Artist Animation,” CMS/W Colloquium Series, MIT
February 2017 “The Space of Japanese Artist Animation” and Nightlights (video essay), Media Studies and Popular Culture in Contemporary Japan, Syracuse University
November 2016 “The Internet of (Japanese) Things: Cultural Protocols in an Augmented Age,” Center for East Asian Studies, Yale University
June 2016 Scenes Before Cinema (video essay), Association of Asian Studies in Asia, Dōshisha University
May 2016 “Sounding Security in Japan’s Emergency Earthquake Chime,” Music of Sound Workshop, University of Chicago
April 2016 “After Affects: Composited Emotion in Japanese Media Art,” East Asian Media Ecologies Lecture Series, Harvard University
April 2016 “On So Many Maps at Once: The Early Days of Augmented Reality Gaming in Japan,” Gaming East Asia, Princeton University
November 2015 “Off the Grid in Japan’s Augmented Reality: The Dark Alleys of Dennō Coil,” Asia.Theory.Visuality, Princeton University
September 2015 “Media as a Form of Care (Or the Lack Thereof): Going to Sleep with MUJI to Sleep,” Modern Culture and Media Colloquium Series, Brown University
March 2015 “TRON and the Forgotten History of Ubiquitous Computing in Japan,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies
June 2014 “Japanese Film Sound from the Studio to the Streets,” East Asian Studies Symposium, Stanford University
March 2014 “Deforming Bodies with Kawakami Hiromi,” Association for Asian Studies
March 2013 “Solitary Moods as Cinematic Form: The Soundtrack to Tony Takitani,” Association for Asian Studies
March 2012 “Background Video in an Age of ‘Subtractivism,’” Asian Cinema Studies Society, University of Hong Kong
June 2011 “Low-affect Sociality in Contemporary Japan,” Asian Studies Conference Japan, International Christian University
May 2011 “On the Pliocene Coast: Night on the Galactic Railroad as Modal Cinema” Meiji Gakuin Film Workshop, Meiji Gakuin University
November 2010 “Yoshiyuki Rie and the Reorientation of Emotion in 1970s Japan,” Languages of Emotion, Freie Universität
June 2010 “Environmental Music and the Rise of Amenity Culture in Japan” Modern Japan History Workshop, Waseda University
May 2009 Panel participant, “The Play of Nervous Activity: Audiovisual Textures, Multiplanar Narrativity, and Victorian Psychophysics,” Sense and Sensation, UC Berkeley
April 2009 “Ambient Media and the Affective Turn,” Arts Research Center, UC Berkeley
April 2008 “Ambient Video and Information Ecology,” Asian Visual Cultures Working Group, UC Irvine
Published Materials
Books
2022 The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan, Columbia University Press (264 pp.)
2016 Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self, University of Minnesota Press (248 pp.)
Articles in Refereed Journals
2023 "Japan's Retreat to the Metaverse." Media, Culture and Society (fothcoming)
2021 "Acoustics of the One Person Space: Headphone Listening, Detachable Ambience, and the Binaural Prehistory of VR." Sound Studies 7.1: 42-63.
2020 "Telepresence Enclosure: VR, Remote Work, and the Privatization of Presence in a Shrinking Japan." Media Theory 4.1: 33-62.
2020 "Empathy for the Game Master: How Virtual Reality Creates Empathy for Those Seen to Be Creating VR" along with introduction to co-edited special issue (with Brooke Belisle) on "VR: Immersion and Empathy," Journal of Visual Culture 19.1: 65-80 and 3-10.
2016 “From Animation to Augmentation: Dennō Coil and the Composited Self,” Animation 11.3 (November): 228-45
2014 “A Blue Cat on the Galactic Railroad: Anime and Cosmic Subjectivity,” Representations 128 (Fall): 124-58
2014 “Carbon as Creation: Tsuji Naoyuki’s Charcoal Anime,” Mechademia 9: 63-75
2009 “Ambient Landscapes from Brian Eno to Tetsu Inoue,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 21.4: 364-383
2009 “Ambient Literature and the Aesthetics of Calm: Mood Regulation in Contemporary Japanese Fiction,” Journal of Japanese Studies 35.1 (Winter): 87-111
2007 “Reencountering Lee Ufan,” Octopus: A Visual Studies Journal Vol. 3: Import/Export (Fall): 85-98
Chapters in Books
2020 "Solo Animation in Japan: Empathy for the Drawn Body," in Joanne Bernardi and Shota T. Ogawa, eds., Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema. New York: Routledge, pp. 141-52.
2020 "Media," in Marianne Krogh, ed., Connectedness: An Incomplete Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene. Copenhagen: Strandberg, pp. 246-7
2013 “The Domestication of the Cool Cat,” in Ulla Haselstein and Irmela Hijiya- Kirschnereit, eds., The Cultural Career of Coolness: Discourses and Practices of Affect Control in European Antiquity, the United States, and Japan. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 237-50
Other Publications -- Refereed
2020 “Ambience In and Around the Virtual Reality Headset,” in Damion Masson, ed., Ambiances, Alloaesthesia: Proceedings of the 4th International Congress on Ambiances. Paris: International Ambiances Network, Vol. 2, pp. 14-19
Other Publications -- Non-Refereed
---Books
2004 Towards the Bowels of the Earth: Butoh Writhing in Perspectives. Published for distribution among butō dance community via Lulu Press
---Articles
2023 "Learning from VR Motion Sickness," CAVRN (March 12)
2021 "In the Mood," Real Life (April 26)
2019 "The Body Shop." LOGIC magazine 8: Bodies: 100-11.
2018 “Peripheral Visions,” Real Life (July 19)
2016 “The Boombox on the Bus: Erik Satie’s Furniture Music in 2016,” University of Minnesota Press Blog (February 24)
2010 “Unhinged Desire (At Home with Obayashi)” Blu-ray/DVD booklet for Hausu (Masters of Cinema)
2009 “Obayashi Nobuhiko, Vagabond of Time,” Midnight Eye feature article (November 10)
---Book and Film Reviews
2018 Larissa Hjorth, Sarah Pink, Kristen Sharp, and Linda Williams, Screen Ecologies: Art, Media, and the Environment in the Asia-Pacific Region, Pacific Affairs 90.4 (December): 783-85
2017 Mia Consalvo, Atari to Zelda: Japan’s Videogames in Global Contexts, Pacific Affairs 90.2 (June): 367-69
2015 Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics, Japan Forum 27.1 (Winter): 109-11
2007 Tony Takitani (film) Scope 9 (October)
---Translations from Japanese
2013 Nakane Chie, “Group Characteristics based on ‘Place’ (1967)” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 25. Special Issue: “Working Words: New Approaches to Japanese Studies” (2013): 170-78
2011 Hasegawa Hitomi, “The Group 1965: Shining Under the Spotlight.” Catalogue for The Group 1965: We Are Boys!, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany (May - July)
