Marilyn Ivy is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is the author of numerous works concerned with Japanese (post)modernity, including her book Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. She has published essays on media theory, art, and contemporary photography in Japan; her essay "The End of the Line: Tōhoku in the Photographic Imagination" was published as part of the catalogue for the Boston Museum of Fine Art's exhibition In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11. She is currently thinking about performance and politics and is also teaching courses on ecocriticism, technoculture, and aesthetics.