Chiara Pavone

Assistant Professor of Japanese

Chiara Pavone’s research is broadly concerned with the production, canonization, and circulation of disaster narratives. Her doctoral dissertation topic at the University of California, Los Angeles, focuses on media and works of literature produced after the March 2011 Great Eastern Japan earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster with the objective of unveiling “the evidence of radiation as a trope in a public sphere that has strived to erase it.” Her work draws on scholarship in ecocriticism and ecofeminism, political philosophy, and queer theory to propose a mode of reading Pavone calls Radioactive Aesthetics. She delivered a Bard Zoom lecture on the subject in March 2023. Publications include “Spoiled Meals: Immunitary and Metabolic Imaginaries in Kawakami Mieko’s ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ and Murata Sayaka’s Convenience Store Woman” in Literature after Fukushima (Routledge, 2023). Professor Pavone is the recipient of numerous honors from UCLA, including a dissertation year fellowship and Sasakawa graduate fellowship. She previously taught in UCLA’s Department of Asian Languages and Cultures on subjects ranging from global narratives of crisis to beginner and intermediate Japanese and Japanese civilization.