Linda E. White

Linda White, Professor in Japanese Studies, has been teaching at Middlebury in anthropology, gender studies, and Japanese studies since 2005. She earned her B.A. from Michigan State University, her M.A. in Asian Studies from Cornell, and her M.A. and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Colorado. She teaches courses that address contemporary social issues in Japanese society, including globalization, body and culture, gender, and race and ethnicity.

Her research focuses on Japanese feminist activism, intersections between gender, marriage, and family law, and attitudes about the body. White has spent seven years living in the Tokyo area. She has received grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council for ethnographic research. She has published numerous articles on Japanese feminist activism and her most recent was included in a special edition, The Family in East Asia, in the journal, positions. Her book, Gender and the Koseki in Contemporary Japan: Surname, Power, and Privilege, (Routledge 2018) analyzes feminist activism to change the Household Registration law in Japan. White’s new research is an ethnographic study of understandings of race and ethnicity in Japanese society and the cultural and legal roots of race discrimination in the household registration system.

Professor White works closely with students in anthropology, Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, and Global and International Studies, and has been a core member of these programs since her arrival at Middlebury. For the past 4 years, White has worked with the Center for Community Engagement and the Middlebury School in Japan to train students from several different universities and colleges to conduct oral histories with elders in a rural village in Nagano Prefecture.