Next up in our Honours Student Interview Series is Kayla Wilford, who graduated with a Minor in Asian Language and Culture. Scroll down to read through the complete interview and learn all about her honours thesis research and writing process.
What is the title of your honours thesis?
“Presentism, Politics, and How We Construct the Past: As Told through Three Histories of Onna Kabuki”
What interested you in this topic? Why did you choose it for your thesis?
What initially got me interested in the subject of kabuki (a Japanese performing art famous for it’s all-male troupes) was something very simple I heard in one of my history classes one day. A professor, when discussing kabuki, made note that while the art form had banned women from it’s stages for the last four hundred odd years, it had actually been invented by a woman. We moved on quickly after that, and I just sat there thinking to myself. Huh. Invent an entire performing art, and all you become is a footnote in someone else’s lecture. I had the simple thought that I didn’t want this woman, whose name I’d come to learn was Izumo no Okuni, and the troupe of women that performed with her, to just be a footnote. I wanted them to be at the forefront of how we discuss art and performance in the Edo period. However, I had the sobering realization after choosing this topic that I didn’t yet possess the Classical Japanese language ability to do that particular research justice if I was approaching it as a traditional historical narrative, and so I turned to historiography. I started asking questions about how Izumo no Okuni came to inhabit the historical narrative, how she was talked about, who was manipulating and employing her story, and to what ends. These questions and this pivot led to what eventually become the final content of my thesis.
What was your favourite part of the research process?
When I wasn’t suffering under a mountain of documents that felt like way too much and yet somehow never enough, my favourite part of the research process was getting to access the archives at the National Diet Library in Japan. I was blessed from the UBC gods (aka faculty) with a glorious travel grant that allowed me to spend two weeks in Kyoto, and I think there was nothing more satisfying than getting to be in the archives and access materials directly. I have endless gratitude to the many librarians and archivists that helped me make such research possible, and cannot recommend applying for travel grants enough to current students.
Currently I’m in the first year of my PhD in the History department at Harvard University, and so the major occupant of my mind is passing my general exams and thinking up a mind-blowing dissertation topic. My interests have continued in the direction of analyzing gender, performance, sex work, and sexual violence in early modern Japan, and I feel blessed to be under the guidance of amazing scholars like Dr. David Howell and Dr. Andrew Gordon. Hopefully one day soon (and by soon I mean in approximately seven years) I’ll be able to call myself a historian worthy of working in the same field.
What advice would you give to someone who is excited but nervous about writing their honours thesis next year?
I mentioned librarians earlier, and maybe the biggest piece of advice I would give to students facing the daunting prospect of archival research is to use all the resources that you can! UBC has so many phenomenally knowledgeable and kind librarians, and if you have any specific archives you want to visit they will also have wonderful resources you can reach out to. Advisors and professors are (of course) also important fountains of knowledge, but it pays to remember that they’re not your only points of contact. My second piece of advice is to be cognizant of your limits. As much as I wanted to do a history of female performing artists in 17th century Japan, if I had gone forward with that initial idea with the level of linguistic ability I had, the end result simply wouldn’t have been a decent piece of historical writing. Keep in mind what you can do, what you can’t, how much time you have, and what archives you have access to. And remember that you have a lot of time to continue in any vein of research during graduate studies if that’s something you’re interested in pursuing!
Do you have a fun fact or anecdote that you would like to share?
A fun fact about me is that despite being a historian of theatre and the performing arts, as a human person I would rather actually die than perform on a stage in front of an audience. Doesn’t matter if it’s Shakespeare or a piano recital, I fear I do not have a theatrical bone in my body. Turns out ‘if you can’t do, teach’ is maybe (a little embarrassingly) true in my case.
