Hana Lethen is a PhD candidate specializing in theater and performance in premodern Japan. In particular, her work focuses on how the embodied techniques, aesthetic conventions, and other distinguishing characteristics of medieval theatrical genres offer insights in excess of privileged textual and documentary archives. Her dissertation, Choreographies of Eccentricity: Madness and Gender in Medieval Noh Theater, examines how the identification of madness with dance shaped embodiments of difference in noh’s genre of “madness plays.” Evidencing her steadfast commitment to scholarship informed by praxis, she has extensive training and performance experience in noh dance and chanting as well as nihon buyō.

Hana’s article, “Moving Spectacles: Madwomen and Human Trafficking in Noh’s Peripheries,” is forthcoming in the Spring 2026 issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright and FLAS fellowships. She received her AB in comparative literature from Princeton in 2017.