Hiroko Kumaki is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Oberlin College, with a courtesy appointment in East Asian Studies. Her research is based in the Tohoku region of Japan, which she is a native to. It engages ethnographies and social theories of health, environment, as well as science and technology to examine what it means to live well in the context of profound environmental crisis. 
 
Her current book project, Becoming Fukei: Living Well in a Relational Landscape after Fukushima examines regulatory policies and everyday practices of health and well-being after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Accident in 2011. Her article “Suspending Nuclearity” was published in Cultural Anthropology in 2022. Another article “Intra-Mediary Expertise” is forthcoming in Social Studies of Science. Her second project Environ-Mental Health: Scaling Environmental Change in Healthcare examines how environmental change has been scaled and negotiated in disaster response, with a focus on Kokoro no Kea or mental healthcare in Japan. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, among others. She was awarded the Richard Saller Prize for the most distinguished dissertation in the Social Science Division at the University of Chicago.  
 
Prior to Oberlin, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University, and a B.A. in Anthropology from Harvard University. She is also an Associate in Research at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.