Yuki Miyamoto is an ethicist whose work centers on nuclear discourse and environmental ethics through the framework of comparative ethics. Her monograph Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima (Fordham University Press, 2011) examines the ways in which sufferers of the atomic bombings of 1945 came to terms with the nuclear attacks within their religious understandings while critiquing the framework imposed by nation-states. She continues to work on nuclear discourse, marshaling the key concepts of commemoration and gender representation in articles such as “In the Light of Hiroshima” (2017), and “Gendered Bodies in Tokusatsu” (2016). Her book Naze genbaku ga aku dewa nai noka (Iwanami, 2020) illustrates the divergence of nuclear discourse in the U.S. and Japan, examining the American perception of “the nuclear” in religious, educational, and popular cultural scenes. Against the backdrop of the still unfolding disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011, her most recent book, A World Otherwise: Environmental Praxis in Minamata (Lexington, 2021) investigates the environmental ethics that emerged out of a community that has suffered from methylmercury pollution in Minamata, Japan.
Research Interests
- Comparative Ethics
- Nuclear Ethics
- Japan
- Environmental Ethics
Courses Frequently Taught
REL 202 Atom Bomb Discourse
HON 104 Religious Worldviews and Ethical Perspectives
HON 350 Honors Senior Seminar: The Atomic Age
LSP 112 Focal Point Seminar: Re/Presentation of Japan