Lyman Gamberton

Project Overview

Gamberton's Brotherton Fellowship project focuses on the Cecil Roth Judaica Archives. The primary text is an eighteenth-century Venetian Jewish woman's prayerbook, "The Book for Women" [Sefer le-nashim], which contains a wealth of charms, remedies, and folk magic practices alongside Hebrew liturgy. This book is written in the vernacular Judeo-Italian dialect, making it a rare and exciting window into historic Italian Jewish women's everyday lives; Gamberton will be reading it in conversation with other texts in the Roth Archives which deal with gender and embodiment, including circumcision records, marriage services, and devotional texts for a female readership. 

His research questions are:

1. How did early modern Italian Jews conceptualise the relationship between medicine, magic, and prayer?
2. What kind of magical and religious practices did they use to combat illness and ensure wellbeing?
3. What sorts of illnesses, fears, and taboos shaped their world, and how do these compare to Jewish folk practices today?

As a result of this work, he aims to produce:

1. A limited-edition podcast of five episodes, each pairing one item from the Roth Archives with a guest discussant who is an expert on the topic. 
2. A talk on Jewish magical-medicinal practices followed by a zine-making workshop. Participants will be shown examples of amulets, charms, and healing formulae from the Roth manuscripts, then will create and illustrate their own zines based on ideas of wellness, magic, folklore, and self-care. 

Profile

Gamberton received his BA in Litterae Humaniores 1B (Classics) from Oxford in 2013 and his PhD in Social Anthropology from SOAS in 2022.  

Gamberton's primary research interest is 'the Othered body in social context'. He has written extensively on gendered experiences of Nagasaki A-bomb survivors; transgender identity and community formation in contemporary Japan; eugenics; queer ecologies; affect as embodied social experience; and the ethnomethodology of gender.  

Publications

“Each Life Has Its Place”: Transgender Existence in Contemporary Kansai (PhD dissertation, 2022. Available online at: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/37397/)  

Book chapters

"I Sing the Body Contingent: Transition as Gender-Work in Contemporary Japan" (chapter) in The Work of Gender: Service, Performance, and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan (ed. Gygi, Fabio and Gitte Hansen, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2022)  

“Waveform Wizard: An Interview with Video Game Music Composer Junko Ozawa” [original Japanese interview and English translation], in The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music (ed. Fritsch, Melanie and Timothy Summers, Cambridge University Press, 2021)  

Journal Articles

"Fearing Fertility: Coerced Sterilisation, Eugenics Laws, and Transgender Personhood in Japan" (article) in Embodied Discourse, Embodied Practice. The Hasekura Intercultural Studies Series, 9th Edition (Tohoku University Center for Integrated Japanese Research, forthcoming March 2026)  

"'A dybbuk has entered the body of the bride': Possession and its Creepy Affects in Ansky- Kushner's The Dybbuk" (article) in "The Creepy Issue", Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (Routledge, forthcoming Autumn 2025).  

“Secondary Pathology: Cisgender Fragility and the Pandemic Body Politic” (article) in Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie Orientale (Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice Press, 2023) 

Conferences and Presentations

Female Uncles and Respected Buttocks: Philologies of Transgender Japan. The Queer and Trans Philologies Conference. Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK. March 2024.  

Fearing Fertility: Coerced Sterilisation, Reproductive Rights, and Transgender Parenthood in Japan. The 8th Annual Hasekura International Japanese Studies Symposium. Sapienza University, Rome. January 2024.  

Blood of the Covenant, Water of the Mikveh: Queering Jewish Ecologies. The British Society for Literature and Science Winter Symposium 2023 Oxford, UK. December 2023.  

“No Reason to Fear Her Karma”: Gender Transition in Medieval Japanese Literature. Gender and Medieval Studies Conference: Aftermath, Recovery, and Repair.
Birkbeck, London, UK. January 2023.  

Embodied Contradictions: Gender Transition and the Limits of Legal Imagination in Japan. The 16th Annual Conference on Asian Studies. Palacký University, Olomouc, Czechia. November 2022.  

Transition and Translation in “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”. Bristol Limmud. Bristol, UK. June 2022.  

PhD Symposium 'Fragile Selves'. Università Ca' Foscari, Venice, Italy. March 2022.  

Secondary Pathology: Cisgender Fragility and the Pandemic Body Politic.

Engendered Conflicts: Reading Between the Lines of Transgender Existence and the Japanese State. The 16th Annual Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies. Hosted by Leuven University, Belgium. August 2021.