Michael Foster (academic)

Michael Dylan Foster is a professor of Folklore and the current Chair of the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at the University of California, Davis. He has taught in some capacity since 1989, starting in Japan teaching the English language on the Japanese Exchange and Teaching Programme, returning to the United States to teach Japanese folklore and literature. In addition to his academic career, which has mainly focused on Japanese literature and culture, he has published several short stories, articles, and novels. Much of his work on Japanese folklore has centered on tales of the supernatural—the strange and the weird. That is the subject of his first book, Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yôkai, which received the Chicago Folklore Prize in 2009. He is the current editor of the Journal of Folklore Research.

Education

Foster studied English in his undergraduate institution of Wesleyan University, and graduated with Honors. For his Master's he studied Japanese Literature and Folklore at University of California, Berkeley, where his folklore studies were influenced by Alan Dundes. He also did intensive language study in Yokohama, Japan and studied History and Folklore at Kanagawa University. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University, in the department of Asian Languages: Japanese.

Research interests

Michael Foster's interests include Japanese folklore, history, festival, literature, supernatural, and popular culture.

He has been is working on a book entitled Visiting Strangers: Tourists, Ethnographers, and Gods, which will look at tourism, festivals, and ethnographers in Japan.
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