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
REGIONAL FOCUS
Japan and East Asia.
RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS
Historical anthropology, space and place, modernity, the global and the local, transnationalism, nationalism, ethnicity, identity, gift exchange, consumption, food, the body, and sports.
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.