Bruce Baird teaches Japanese theater, cinema, philosophy, manga, anime, and video games at UMass Amherst.  His primary research topic is the Japanese avant-garde dance butô (butoh) about which he has published several articles and books.  His landmark book, Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits was released by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012. With Rosemary Candelario, he co-edited the Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, released in August 2018. Subsequently, he published A History of Butô (Oxford University Press, 2022), an account of ten of the most important choreographer/performers of the first and second generation of  butô. Recently, Bruce has taken an interest in manga, anime, Japanese video games, and Japanese new media studies.