Haruka Umetsu Cho received her B.A. from International Christian University, Tokyo, her M.Div. at Yale Divinity School, and her Ph.D. in Religion, Gender, and Culture at Harvard University. Her research interests span Christian theology, East Asian literature, feminist/queer theories, and postcolonial studies. She is currently working on her first book, a theological reading of modern Japanese fiction and poetry (between the late 1860s-1930s). The book focuses on themes of the Divine, eros, and women’s flesh and analyzes how, in the context of Western colonialism and modernism, those themes were transmitted, adapted, and reinterpreted by Japanese writers.