UCI’s Margherita Long is 1 of only 8 awarded UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowships

Margherita Long, associate professor of East Asian studies, has earned a UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowship for 2019-20. One of only eight recipients across the University of California system, she will use the $30,000 in support of her book project, Care, Affect, Crackup: Literature & Activism After Fukushima, which takes an environmental humanities approach to Japan’s nuclear crisis. It explores creative works and activism after the triple nuclear reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on March 11, 2011. “I study novelists, activists and documentarians for whom living with radiation can lead to both ‘crackup’ (depression, inertia, burnout) and innovation and creativity,” Long said. “It’s a distinction that pivots on care and care work, which I locate not only in the labor of mothers, doctors and activists documented in films, but in the art-making of writers and their protagonists.” She is also the author of This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory & Freud (Stanford University Press, 2009). Funded by the UC Humanities Research Institute and UC Office of the President, the fellowships provide recipients with paid leave from regular teaching duties to pursue their own research projects.