My research has focused most generally on the question of modernity, with particular emphasis on Japan. I approach the anthropology of modernity from several perspectives. One takes its inspiration from critical theory and its varied anatomies of the crises of the modern (most emblematically revealed by fascism). My work on mass media, capitalism, and everyday life is informed by these approaches. Related to my interests in critical theory are my concerns with questions of representation and interpretation opened up by semiotic and post-semiotic protocols of reading and textual analysis. Finally, I am committed to keeping the crucial importance of historical reflection in the forefront of my research, teaching, and ethnographic practice.

Representative Publications:

Ivy, Marilyn. 1998. “Mourning the Japanese Thing,” in Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory of the End of the Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ivy, Marilyn. 1996. “Tracking the Mystery Man with the 21 Faces.” Critical Inquiry 23:11-36.

Ivy, Marilyn. 1996. “Ghostlier Demarcations: Textual Fantasy and the Origins of Japanese Nativist Ethnology.” In Culture and Contexture: Readings in Anthropology and Literary Study, edited by E. Valentine Daniel and Jeffrey M. Peck, 296-322. Berkeley: The University of California Press.

Ivy, Marilyn. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Ivy, Marilyn. 1993. “Have You Seen Me?: Recovering the Inner Child in Late Twentieth-Century America.” Social Text, no. 37:227-252.

Ivy, Marilyn. 1989. “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan.” In Postmodernism and Japan, edited by H.D. Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi, 21-46. Durham and London: Duke University Press.