• PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology, University of California - Berkeley, 2002
• MA in Socio-Cultural Anthropology, University of California - Berkeley, 1994
• BA in History, Political Science, and the History of Culture, University of Wisconsin – Madison – 1992

• Japan and East Asia.

• Historical anthropology, space and place, modernity, the global and the local, transnationalism, nationalism, ethnicity, identity, gift exchange, consumption,  food, the body, and sports.

• AN101 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
• AN231 Anthropology of Food
• AN252C East Asia in Motion
  
• AN351C Embodying East Asia
  
• AN351C Anthropology of the Body
  
• AN366 Senior Seminar in Anthropology
  
• SSP100 Food, Self, and Society

BOOKS

• Multiculturalism in the New Japan.
  

SCHOLARSHIP

• Nelson Graburn and R. Kenji Tierney, eds. 2007. Multiculturalism in the New Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within. London and New York: Berghahn Press.
• R. Kenji Tierney. 2007. “Outside the Sumo Ring? Foreigners and Re-thinking the National Sport.” In Multiculturalism in the New Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within, edited by Nelson Graburn and R. Kenji Tierney. London and New York: Berghahn Press.
• R. Kenji Tierney. 2007. “From Performance to National Sport (Kokugi): The ‘Nationalization’ of Sumo,” in This Sporting Life: Sports and Body Culture in Modern Japan, edited by William Kelly. New Haven, CT: Yale CEAS Occasional Publications.
• R. Kenji Tierney. 2007. Book Review of Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics. 2006, by Laura Miller. American Anthropologist 109: 773-4.
• R. Kenji Tierney. 2006. Book Review of The Too-Good Wife: Alcohol, Codependency, and the Politics of Nurturance in Postwar Japan. 2005, by Amy Borovoy. Anthropological Quarterly 79: 791-5.
• R. Kenji Tierney. 2004. “It’s a Gottsan World: The Role of the Patron in Sumo,” in Fanning the Flames of Fandom: Fandoms and Consumer Culture in Contemporary Japan, edited by William Kelly. New York: SUNY Press.

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