Michael Foster

Who is Michael Foster?

Michael Foster is an assistant professor of Folklore at Indiana University Bloomington. He has taught in some capacity since 1989, starting in Japan teaching the English language, returning to the states to teach Japanese, and moving on to Japanese folklore and literature. In addition to his academic career, which has mainly focused on Japanese literature and culture, he has published several short stories. Much of his work on Japanese folklore has centered around tales of the supernatural—the strange and the weird. That is the subject of his first book, Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yôkai, which received the Chicago Folklore Prize in 2009.