https://discovery.nus.edu.sg/340-beng-choo-lim
LIM Beng Choo is Associate Professor and Head of Japanese Studies at National University of Singapore. She received her doctoral degree from Cornell University in East Asian Literature. Her research spans three intersecting areas: traditional Japanese performance and the digital humanities; Japanese–Chinese interactions in premodern Japanese theatre; and the analysis and translation of noh. Across these areas, she has made contributions to understanding noh within its changing "media ecologies," from medieval cultural exchange to holograms, live streaming, and virtual reality.
She participated in the inaugural meeting of the “New Directions in Noh Workshop” in 2024, presenting online on digital humanities and traditional theatre. Since then, she has continued to be a virtual member of the group, exchanging ideas and learning of some members’ work progress via email and video. Later in 2024, she presented "Digital Technologies and Traditional Japanese Theater: From the Internet to DH Projects" at the Colloquium of the Languages and Cultures Network for Australian Universities. Discussion at the workshop shaped her thinking.
Her 2024 presentation drew on research developed over several years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she examined the online circulation of traditional theatre in "Traditional Japanese Theater Online: Performance in the Time of Pandemic" (Journal for Japanese Studies, 2021). In "Techno-Tradition: A Foray into Technology-Integrated Traditional Japanese Theatre" (Japanese Studies, 2022), co-authored with Julie A. Iezzi, she analyzed hologram "fusion noh," Vocaloid kabuki and bunraku, and VR noh to question how "traditional" is defined in contemporary media ecologies.
At the 2023 “Performing Intermedia in Japan” conference, she assessed Noh as Intermedia, a digital humanities project developed by three musicologists, arguing that digital tools offer alternative methodologies for studying noh, particularly its musical dimensions. She also created PerformCT (Perform Contemporary Tradition), a virtual space for research on traditional theatre in contemporary times, in 2018.
By bringing digital humanities into conversation with textual, musical, and performance-based scholarship, she tests new approaches against deep expertise in the tradition itself. The result benefits both sides: digital methods gain rigor from close engagement with noh, and noh scholarship gains new tools and questions.
Lim also extends the workshop's reach beyond Japan and North America. Her recent work on the development of Japanese Studies in Southeast Asia, including "Japanese Studies in ASEAN: Recent Developments" (2025) and "Japan, Japanese Studies and Singapore: Localising Agents in Cultural Diplomacy" (2026), along with her engagement with Southeast Asian academic networks, makes her well positioned to connect the workshop with scholarly communities between Southeast Asia and Japan.