Masafumi Monden

Masafumi Monden is an emerging fashion and cultural studies scholar specializing in Japanese culture. He has been invited to speak at national and international symposiums including The Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology Annual Symposium, New York and The Asian Art Museum's Global Impact of Japanese Fashion public seminar, San Francisco. 

He regularly publishes in high quality presses such as the Yale University Press in the areas of men's and women's clothing, Japan, art, youth and popular culture. His first book, Japanese Fashion Cultures is released from Bloomsbury Academic (2015). The book investigates the complexities of dress and gender, and demonstrates the flexible nature of contemporary fashion and style exchange in an increasingly global context.

Masafumi has also served on the PhD Committee, and serves as a peer-reviewer on academic journals and manuscripts, including Bloomsbury Academic, Fashion Theory, Business History, US- Japan Women's Journal, Japanese Studies, Men and Masculinities, and Asian Studies Review.

Masafumi is currently working on two book-length projects: one on cultural imagination of Japanese girlhood (shoujo) and boyhood (shounen), and another on cultural history of fashion, consumerism, aesthetics and the body in modern Japan.

Masafumi is a recent receipient of the Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Fellowship (2016) and The National Library of Australia Fellowship in Japan Studies (2017).

Masafumi currently teaches:

• JAPAN5 Japanese 5
• JAPAN6 Japanese 6
• ASIA3004 Gender and Power in Asia
• ASIA2004 Popular Culture in Asia (co-coordinating with A/Prof. Jo Elfving-Hwang)
• ASIA2002 Australia and Asia (co-coordinating with A/Prof. Stephen Dobbs)

In addition, he supervises an Honours student (co-supervision).

Masafumi has taught international relations, world history, Japanese literature, culture and history, and Asian popular culture at the University of Sydney and the University of Technology Sydney.

In addition to the presentation of his work in academic contexts, Masafumi's expertise and knowledge in gender, culture, fashion and Japanese youth studies have attracted attention in a variety of non-academic settings, including in media appearances such as ABC Radio National (Canberra, July 2017) and the New York Times (January 2017).

Masafumi has taught Japanese at Saturday Japanese language school for children in Sydney, NSW (2014 - 2015) and often helps high school students with their school projects concerning Japan, Asia, gender and culture. 

He enjoys giving public lecture on Japanese culture (e.g. the National Library of Australia, 2017) and Japanese fashion (e.g. Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 2019) to communicate his research outside of academia. 

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

School of Design, University of Technology Sydney, 2017 - 2019.

International Researcher

Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, University of Tokyo, 2016 - 2017.

English

Japanese

French (basic)