Makoto Harris Takao, Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Working at the intersection of cultural history, religious studies, musicology, and the history of emotions, Takao’s research coheres around the mapping of Japan’s international relations from the sixteenth century to the present day. His current book project, The Clef and the Cross: Music and Kirishitan Transculturation in Sixteenth-Century Japan, asks what it meant to sound Kirishitan (Japanese Christian) and in what ways these communities “sounded” their belonging. In doing so, practices of sound, music, and movement are both revealed and reconstructed to demonstrate how these practitioners made sense of Catholic doctrine through existing Japanese performing traditions and Buddhist frameworks.
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