Laura Spielvogel
Associate Professor and Undergraduate Advisor
Office: (269)
387-4140
Email:
Location
1021 Moore Hall
Education
Ph.D., Cultural Anthropology, Yale University, 1998
Research interests
Gender and the body, sport and leisure,
identity
Regional focus: Japan
Bio
Laura Ginsberg Spielvogel works on issues of gender, popular culture,
and globalization in contemporary Japan and with notions of identity and community that define cultures
in the United States. In her book, “Working Out in Japan: Shaping the Female Body in Tokyo Fitness Clubs”
(Duke University Press, 2003), she takes the Japanese fitness club as the institutional lens through
which to view the symbolic construction of the female body, intersections between local and global
interpretations of health and sport, and the changing complexions of work and leisure in late-capitalist
Japan. She has also published articles in The Journal of Sport and Social Issues and The Sociology of Sport
and has had her work featured in the Harvard Magazine. She is currently working on two related projects that explore identity,
gender, stereotyping, and cultural relativism. In her first project, she is creating a web-based, role-playing
educational simulation where students play characters engaged in a Japanese-American wedding. After a successful pilot
during Fall 2006 in the Honor's College, she revised the simulation during her sabbatical leave. In her
second project, she is writing an ethnographic novel that also explores the challenges of a Japanese-American courtship and
marriage.
