Kitamura Sae


Kitamura Sae is a Japanese scholar specialising in British literature and a literary critic. A graduate of the University of Tokyo and King's College London, her primary areas of research are William Shakespeare, the history of performing arts, and feminist literature. She is also an active Wikipedian, encouraging students to translate articles from English Wikipedia to Japanese Wikipedia in her classes.
Kitamura has been a professor at Musashi University since 2023. She was formerly a lecturer and associate professor at Musashi University from 2014 to 2023, and a director of the in 2019. Some of her works include Women Who Enjoyed Shakespeare's Plays, Sugar, Spice, and Something Explosive, and The Classroom of Critique. She also writes essays about synesthesia.

Biography

Early life

Kitamura was born on 12 April 1983 in Shibetsu, Hokkaido. Her father is, president of the regional newspaper ', and her grandfather is, former president of the Douhoku Nippou and a literary critic.
Kitamura developed her interest in William Shakespeare after watching Romeo + Juliet starring Leonardo DiCaprio. While studying at Hokkaido Asahikawa Higashi High School, she worked as a library assistant as part of her club activities. During that time, she read The Second Sex and Wuthering Heights. Her work Drive My Car Crazy, published in ' in 2001, won the "39th Arishima Junior Prize".

William Shakespeare study

Kitamura entered the University of Tokyo after graduating from high school, and worked part-time to fund her education. She majored in, graduating March 2006. In March 2008, she completed her master's degree in Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies at the University of Tokyo, doing research on the Shakespearean play Antony and Cleopatra under the guidance of and. She befriended during this time.
Kitamura entered the University of Tokyo's doctoral program as a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in April 2008. Her field of study was "Representation of Women in Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedy", exploring Shakespeare's place in traditional Cleopatra literature, as well as examining the way women are portrayed in Shakespeare's plays, and how menstruation and pregnancy were represented in Renaissance England. She also researched a queer reading of As You Like It interpreted by Yukio Ninagawa.
Enrolling at King's College London in October 2009, Kitamura resigned from the research fellowship to continue her study of gender and Shakespeare. She has examined and analysed 800 volumes of Shakespeare-related documents from the 16th to 18th centuries, in both England and New Zealand. At the Auckland Public Library in New Zealand, she discovered letters from the previous owner of the Third Folio.
Kitamura submitted her doctoral thesis in April 2013 and was awarded a PhD in October 2013. Upon returning to Japan, she worked part-time at, Keio University, and the University of Tokyo.

Musashi University

In 2014, Kitamura became a lecturer in the Department of British and American Studies at Musashi University. That same year, she conducted a social media study on the reception of Shakespeare's works. In October 2015, she began a column on messy, and published writings on synesthesia. She also began incorporating Wikipedia into her coursework.
Since 2017, Kitamura has been an associate professor at Musashi University. She has lectured on Shakespeare at Waseda University, and published a series on Shakespeare in collaboration with The Asahi Shimbun.
In March 2017, Kitamura published Women Who Enjoyed Shakespeare's Plays, which received awards from both the Association for Studies of Culture and Representation and the granted by Nara Women's University in 2019.
She followed up with Sugar, Spice, and Something Explosive in June 2019. The book includes columns from messy/''wezzy, critiques of Frozen, Fight Club, and Vanishing Point from a feminist perspective, and discussions on Burlesque. It was ranked 18th in "Kinobes! 2020: The Best 30 Kinokuniya Bookstore Staff Recommends".
In September 2019, Kitamura published The Classroom of Critique, illustrated by "Tokunagaasako". The book defines a critic's role in both interpretation and evaluation of creative work. One chapter features a student interaction in the editing process. According to The Nikkei, the book was reprinted four times within four months, selling 50,000 copies by January 2022.
Kitamura's research was supported multiple times by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science through the, including "The Changes in the Perception of 'Male Beauty' in the Performance History of Early Modern English Drama" in September 2019, and "Women and Public Speaking in Early Modern England" in April 2023. In 2020, she published an essay on the fourth wave of feminism in Gendai Shisō.
Since April 2023, Kitamura has served as a professor of the Graduate School of Humanities in both the Department of British and American Studies and in the European and American Studies Major. In June 2023, she released her collection of cultural essays, English Back Alley''.
From April 2024 to April 2025, Kitamura went on sabbatical leave at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. During this time, she served as a Wikipedian in residence at the Library of Trinity College Dublin.

Research

Kitamura emphasises the importance of literature in teaching English, and encourages her students to analyse literary works from a director's perspective in university classes.
Kitamura has studied the reception of Shakespeare's works on social media, stating:
She also analyses the business aspects of Shakespeare's works.

As a Wikipedian

Since 2010, Kitamura has been contributing to Wikipedia under the username "". One of her key contributions is running the Wikipedia Translation Project as part of her annual university coursework.
Kitamura organised a panel on editing Wikipedia at a 2016 conference of the, and co-hosted an academic symposium on 28 September 2019 with and, addressing the use and challenges of Wikipedia in higher education.
Kitamura has participated in Art+Feminism and other edit-a-thons, and has appeared on TV and radio as a Wikipedian. She also expanded on privacy concerns of Japanese Wikipedia during the controversy surrounding the Higashi-Ikebukuro runaway car crash article.
Kitamura has addressed the issue of gender bias on Wikipedia by helping the organisation of WikiGap in 2019 and publishing a paper on the topic in 2020. In 2021, Kitamura discussed the challenges of notability for women, citing the example of Marie Curie's treatment on English Wikipedia in an interview held by the Mainichi Shimbun.

Personal life

According to a 2019 interview, Kitamura reads approximately 260 books, goes to a cinema 100 times, and attends the theatre 100 times each year.

Published works

Appearances

Magazine

  • Radio programmes

  • TBS Radio, "アフター6ジャンクション", 2019: 10 April, 3 July, 27 December. 2020: 27 July, 25 December. 2021: 22 September. 2022: 28 December. 2023: 23 March. 2024: September
  • CBC Radio, "若狭敬一のスポ音", 12 December 2020, 「光山雄一朗の気になったので聞いてみました 第5回 ウィキペデイアの知らない世界に誘います!」
  • FM Yokohama, "FUTURESCAPE", 6 February 2021.
  • Nippon Cultural Broadcasting, "村上信五くんと経済クン", 30 October 2021

    TV programmes

  • NHK, "グレーテルのかまど" at Eテレ, 5 August 2019
  • TBS, マツコの知らない世界「ウィキペディアの世界」, 3 September 2019

    Video works

  • Musashi University,
  • Historians' Workshop,
  • TEDx Talks,

    Awards

  • December 2001: "39th Arishima Junior Prize" by The Hokkaido Shimbun for Drive My Car Crazy.
  • June 2019: "10th Studies of Culture and Representation Prize" from the Association for Studies of Culture and Representation for "シェイクスピア劇を楽しんだ女性たち".
  • November 2019: 14th Women's History Award by the Center for Gender and Women's Culture in Asia at Nara Women's University, also for "シェイクスピア劇を楽しんだ女性たち".
  • December 2019: Ranked 4th in "Kinokuniya Shimbum Prize" by Kinokuniya for "お砂糖とスパイスと爆発的な何か".
  • December 2024: UK Wikimedian of the Year 2024, Honourable Mention.

    Inline citations

Japan Science and Technology Agency

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