https://directory.nau.edu/?person=dj574

Dunja Jelesijevic is Associate Professor of Comparative Religion and Asian Studies in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at Northern Arizona University. She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures, with a specialization in Japanese religion, from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her current research interests include the religious dimensions of noh, particularly its treatment of salvation, ritual, and Buddhist teaching; gender, the body, and female agency in noh's portrayals of wronged wives, demonic women, and grieving mothers; and the connections between noh and contemporary Japanese horror. 

She has participated in all three meetings of the New Directions in Noh workshop. Her paper for the first meeting in 2024, "Mad Mothers and Ghostly Children: J-Horror as Modern Mother/Child Monogurui," connects the workshop to the study of contemporary horror. She has traced how noh's monogurui (madness) plays, especially those depicting mothers searching for lost children, reappear in modern horror films. The paper presented at the workshop was an article-length version that came out of two previous presentations: "Creepy Boys and 'Dead Wet Girls': Motifs of Mother/Child Monogurui in J-Horror" at the Association for Japanese Literary Studies (2023) and "Mad Mothers and Ghostly Children: J-Horror as Modern Mother/Child Monogurui" at the Nordic Association for the Study of Contemporary Japanese Society (2024). By drawing these connections, Jelesijevic brings noh into dialogue with scholars and audiences of contemporary media and shows the genre's continuing imaginative power. 

While this paper is being revised for publication, she continued to publish about bodies, suffering, and transformation in two studies: "A Lady's Reckoning: Torture, Eroticism, and Salvation in the Noh Play Shikimi Tengu," in Olomouc Asian Studies, Vol. 3: Bodies, Gender, and Identities in Asia, and "The Serpent Dancer: Multiple Identities and Competing Rituals in Noh Play Dōjōji," in Pre-modern Monsters , edited by Allan Wright (Vernon Press). Her other publications include “‘Dangerous’ Beauty: Imagining the Other in the Noh Play Sesshōseki,” in Narratives Crossing Borders: Cultural Perspectives, edited by Herbert Jonsson (Stockholm University Press), and “Shinto Spaces and Shinbutsu Interaction in the Noh” in Exploring Shinto, edited by Michael Pye (Equinox Publications).  

Her paper for the second meeting, “To ‘Her’ with love: Dharma Lessons from the Mountain Demon in Noh Plays Yamamba and Kurozuka,” resulted in a revision that was presented at the third meeting in 2026, "Demonic Pedagogy: Dharma Lessons from the Mountain Demon in Noh Plays Yamamba and Kurozuka."  It explored how these demonic figures serve as vehicles for Buddhist teaching. Her readings treat noh's demons and madwomen not only as dramatic characters but as sites where religious doctrine, social anxiety, and gendered experience meet.