IAFOR > The Asian Conference on Media, Communication & Film (MediAsia) > MediAsia2018 > Speakers

Speakers

Keynote, Featured and Spotlight Speakers will provide a variety of perspectives from different academic and professional backgrounds. This page provides information about presenters. For details of presentations and other programming, please visit the Programme page.

  • Professor Georg Adlmaier-Herbst
    Professor Georg Adlmaier-Herbst
    Berlin University of the Arts, Germany
  • Stuart Galbraith IV
    Stuart Galbraith IV
    Film Historian
  • Professor Kaori Hayashi
    Professor Kaori Hayashi
    The University of Tokyo, Japan
  • Professor Yutaka Kubo
    Professor Yutaka Kubo
    Waseda University, Japan
  • Professor Chie Niita
    Professor Chie Niita
    Waseda University, Japan

Previous Speakers

View details of speakers at past MediAsia conferences via the links below.

Professor Georg Adlmaier-Herbst
Berlin University of the Arts, Germany

Professor Georg Adlmaier-Herbst is an internationally recognised expert in communication. He is the Scientific Director at the Berlin Career College of the University of the Arts Berlin. He is also a guest professor at the Jiao Tong University in Shanghai and the Latvian Culture Academy in Riga, and lecturer in Communication Management in two executive MBA programmes at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Dr Adlmaier-Herbst is a member of the Institute of Electronic Business’ "Council of Internet Sages", he has been voted a “Professor of the Year” (Social Sciences 2011), and has also written 22 books, many of which have been translated.

Keynote Presentation (2018) | When All the Research Says Otherwise but Fear Remains: On the Role of Facts in Dealing with Future Fears
Stuart Galbraith IV
Film Historian

Biography

Kyoto-based film historian Stuart Galbraith IV has had a long and varied career, but throughout it all he has demonstrated a great respect for the past and a strong conviction that it should be preserved for future generations. An archivist for Warner Bros. and a researcher at MGM, he worked as a “film detective” tracking down long-lost original camera negatives and sound elements, and earlier helped initiate film preservation projects and procedures for the USC-Warner Bros. Archives.

Mr Galbraith is the author of seven books, including the critically acclaimed The Emperor and The Wolf, a joint biography of Toshiro Mifune and Akira Kurosawa, which was used as the basis for the 2015 documentary Mifune: The Last Samurai from Academy Award–winning documentary maker Steven Okazaki. In addition to contributing to Blu-ray and DVD commentaries, essays, and documentaries for films as varied as Battles without Honor and Humanity and Tora-san Our Lovable Tramp, Mr Galbraith has continued to produce many, many Blu-ray and DVD reviews.

His latest preservation project has been more personal, renovating a traditional 200 year-old Japanese house in the mountains of northern Kyoto Prefecture, helping to preserve a minka built at a time when samurai still roamed the country.

Featured Presentation (2018) | A Past Worth Saving: Reflections on a Lifetime of Cultural and Film Preservation in Hollywood and Japan
Professor Kaori Hayashi
The University of Tokyo, Japan

Biography

Kaori Hayashi is Professor of Media and Journalism Studies at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, the University of Tokyo. She has also served as Managing Director of the University of Tokyo Newspaper as well as a member of Broadcasting Ethics and Program Improvement Organization (an independent self-regulatory organization of the broadcasting industry in Japan) and a board member of the Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien (German Institute for Japanese Studies).

Besides conducting research and education at the University of Tokyo, Kaori Hayashi also holds several academic as well as professional offices, such as membership of the Broadcasting Ethics and Program Improvement Organization (a third-party organization in the broadcasting industry), guest researcher at the Asahi Shimbun, and board member of the Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien (German Institute for Japanese Studies). She is also a member of the board of the Japan Society for Mass Communication and Journalism Studies.

She was a Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University, at Goldsmiths, University of London as well as at Freie Universität Berlin as a recipient of the SSRC/Abe Fellowship for the year 2016-17. Her most recent English publications include “A journalism of care”, In Rethinking Journalism Again. Societal Role and Public Relevance in a Digital Age. Edited by Chris Peters and Marcel Broersma, Routledge, 2016, 146–160. She has also published a book in Japanese titled "メディア不信　何が問われているのか"（Media Distrust: What are the real issues?）in 2017, in which she compares media distrust in the USA, the UK, Germany and Japan. For her publication list, please see: http://www.hayashik.iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Keynote Presentation (2018) | Indifferent Publics – The Challenge of Japanese Media Today
Professor Yutaka Kubo
Waseda University, Japan

Biography

Yutaka Kubo is currently an Assistant Professor at the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum at Waseda University, Japan. He received his BA in English with a concentration in Film Studies from Framingham State College, USA, and his MA and PhD in Human and Environmental Studies from Kyoto University, Japan. His research focuses on the exploration of queer sensibility in post-war Japanese cinema and on the films and TV dramas of Keisuke Kinoshita in particular. His other research interests include the representation of queer aging in Japanese cinema, the role of mobility in post-3.11 mourning films, and private/public spheres in home movies.

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | The State of Film Studies in Japan
Professor Chie Niita
Waseda University, Japan

Biography

Chie Niita is a lecturer and adjunct researcher at Waseda University, Japan. Her research focuses on American cinema and media history, with particular interests in sound technology and performance in theatre, film, and radio. She has also worked on Japanese movie theatre and exhibition practices in the pre-war period. Before she received her PhD from Waseda University in 2012, she worked as a Visiting Assistant in Research at Yale University and a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. She is currently teaching courses related to Film Studies, such as Film Theory and Hollywood Cinema and Japanese Cinema History, both in Japanese and in English at Waseda University (SILS), Hosei University (GIS), and the University of Tokyo.

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | The State of Film Studies in Japan