Alice Baldock is the Nissan Institute as the Okinaga Junior Research Fellow in Japanese Studies at Wadham College, University of Oxford. Her research interests include 20th century Japanese history, gender in postwar Japan and the transnational circulation of ideas around ‘the body’, particularly in the development of butoh dance. 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’ (Histories of Sex Work Around the World, 2024), and the foreword to dancer Vangeline’s first book, Cradling Empty Space (2020). Alice also has a creative practice, with recent work including 'Fruit of My Woman' at the New York Butoh Institite Queer Butoh Festival (June 2025), the Bureau of Enivronmental Imaging and Memory Analysis (Modern Art Oxford, March 2025), and as a member of the London Butoh Dance Company in 'Of Mirrors and Shadows'' (Blue Elephant Theatre, November 2024), as well as 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). 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. (Photo credit: Tim Hand)