Haruka Umetsu Cho received her B.A. from International Christian University, Tokyo, her M.Div. at Yale Divinity School, and her Ph.D. in Religion, Gender, and Culture at Harvard University. Her research interests span Christian theology, East Asian literature, feminist/queer theories, and postcolonial studies. She is currently working on her first book, a theological reading of modern Japanese fiction and poetry (between the late 1860s-1930s). The book focuses on themes of the Divine, eros, and women’s flesh and analyzes how, in the context of Western colonialism and modernism, those themes were transmitted, adapted, and reinterpreted by Japanese writers.

Publications

“Kazō Kitamori’s Theology of the Pain of God: A Reading from Perspectives of Japanese Colonial Discourse and Gender Violence,”Asia Journal of Theology34, no. 4 (2020): 21-42. 

“Erotic Desire as a Woman’s Way of Knowing the Divine: Reading Arishima Taeko, A Certain Woman.” (Accepted by Body and Religion)

“Engaging the World as ‘Onna’ and Religious Minority: Second Wave Feminism and Christian Social Activism in Japan during the 1970s.” (Accepted by Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion)