Karen Nakamura joined the UC Berkeley campus in 2016 as the Robert and Colleen Haas Distinguished Chair in Disability Studies and Professor of Anthropology. Her research is on disability, sexuality, and other minority social movements in contemporary Japan. In 2006, she published Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity, an ethnography of sign language and deaf social movements. Her second project on psychiatric disabilities and community based recovery resulted in two ethnographic films and a book titled A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan (2014). While a Townsend Senior Fellow, she plans to finish writing her third monograph on transsexuality, eugenics, sex, and disability — tentatively titled Trans/Japan.