Michael K. Bourdaghs

Michael K. Bourdaghs is an American scholar of Japanese culture specializing in modern Japanese literature and J-pop. He is currently a professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

Biography Michael K. Bourdaghs was born on August 31, 1961. He attended Miyagi University of Education from 1984 to 1985, before obtaining his B.A. in History and Japan Studies at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He received his M.A from Cornell University in 1993. Following this, he served as a graduate research student at Tohoku University for two years before obtaining his Ph.D. in East Asian Literature at Cornell in 1996.

He taught at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1996 to 2008. During this period, he also briefly taught as a visiting researcher at Tohoku and International Christian University. He became an associate professor at the University of Chicago in 2008 after briefly serving as a visiting associate professor the previous year. He received a full professorship at Chicago in 2012. Six years later, he was appointed the Robert S. Ingersoll Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College.

In 2019, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, seeking to write on the history of Japanese popular culture during the Cold War.