Paul Anderer deBary/Class of '41 Professor of Asian Humanities
Paul Anderer holds degrees from Michigan (BA '71), Chicago (MA '72), and Yale (Ph.D. '79). He joined the Columbia faculty in 1980. From 1989 until 1997, he was the chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. He has also served the University as Vice Provost for International Relations, as Associate Vice-President for Academic Planning and Global Initiatives in the Arts and Sciences, and as Acting Dean of the Graduate School. His writings include Other Worlds: Arishima Takeo and the Bounds of Modern Japanese Fiction (Columbia, 1984); and Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo-Literary Criticism, 1924-1939 (Stanford, 1995), along with numerous articles exploring the culture of the city (Tokyo) and Japanese modernity. His work has been awarded support from the NEH, the SSRC, and the Fulbright Commission. He teaches Japanese fiction, film, and cultural criticism in addition to Asian Humanities. He is currently writing a book on the black and white films of Kurosawa Akira, in their relationship to the Japanese post-war and to the era of silent film-making.
Hikari Hori Assistant Professor
Hikari Hori received her Ph. D. in gender studies and Japanese visual cultural studies from Gakushuin University, Tokyo, in 2004. She has worked as a research associate at the National Film Center, Tokyo, and also as a film program coordinator at the Japan Society, New York. Her current research interests include the representation of the Emperor in modern Japanese visual culture; a history of women's activism in modern Japan; war, state and gender represented in arts and film; the representation of sexuality and film censorship; and shojo manga in Asia. Recent publications include: "Aging, Gender and Sexuality in Japanese Popular Culture: Female Pornographer Sachi Hamano and Her Film "Lily Festival" (Yurisai), " in Matsumoto, ed. Faces and Masks (Stanford University Press, forthcoming); "Oshima Nagisa's 'Ai no korida' Reconsidered: Law, Gender, and Sexually Explicit Film in Japanese Cinema," in Creekmur and Sidel, eds., Cinema, Law and the State in Asia (Palgrave, 2007); "Written by a Woman's Body: Atsugi Taka and Wartime Representation of Women," in Saito and Yomota, eds., Nihon eigashi sosho (Shinwasha, 2006); "Migration and Transgression: Female Pioneers' Documentary Filmmaking in Japan," Asian Cinema Journal Vol. 11 (2005).
David Lurie Associate Professor
David Lurie, associate professor of Japanese history and literature, received his B.A. from Harvard (1993) and his M.A. (1996) and PhD. (2001) from Columbia. His first book, on the development of writing systems in Japan through the Heian period, is entitled Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing (forthcoming from the Harvard University Asia Center). Other publications include "Language, Writing, and Disciplinarity in the Critique of the 'Ideographic Myth': Some Proleptical Remarks," Language & Communication 26 (2006); A Brief History of Japanese Civilization, 2nd edition (coauthored with Conrad Schirokauer and Suzanne Gay, 2006); and "On the Inscription of the Hitomaro Poetry Collection: Between Literary History and the History of Writing," Man'yoshu kenkyu 26 (2004). In addition to the history of writing systems and literacy, his research interests include the literary and cultural history of seventh- through twelfth- century Japan, the Japanese reception of Chinese literary, historical, and technical writings, the development of Japanese dictionaries and encyclopedias, and the history of linguistic thought.
Haruo Shirane Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature
Haruo Shirane's fields of interest are Japanese literature, visual culture, and cultural history, with particular focus on intertextuality and language, text/image relations, popular and elite subcultures, and culture and power. He has written widely on Heian, medieval and Edo prose fiction, poetry, and visual culture, as well as on the modern reception of literary classics and the production of the "past."
His most recent book is called Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons (Columbia University Press, forthcoming), which examines the major role that the notion of the seasons have had on Japanese literature, arts, gardens, and architecture.
He is also engaged in bringing new approaches to the study of Japanese literary culture. This has resulted in Japanese Literature and Literary Theory (Nihon bungaku kara no hihyo riron, Kasama shoin, 2009, edited with Fujii Sadakazu and Matsui Kenji) and New Horizons in Japanese Literary Studies (Bensei Publishing, 2009), both of which explore new issues and methodologies in the study of print and literary culture. He was also editor of Food in Japanese Literature (Shibundo, 2008), of Overseas Studies on The Tale of Genji (Ofu, 2008) and of Envisioning The Tale of Genji: Media, Gender, and Cultural Production (Columbia University Press, 2008). The latter two books analyze the impact of The Tale of Genji on Japanese cultural history in multiple genres and historical periods.
He has translated and edited a number of volumes on Japanese literature. These include Classical Japanese Literature, An Anthology: Beginnings to 1600 (Columbia University Press, 2006), Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900 (Columbia University Press, 2002; abridged edition, 2008), The Tales of the Heike (Columbia University Press, 2006, paperback 2008), and most recently The Demon at Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales (Columbia University Press, 2010), a collection of setsuwa (anecdotal literature).
He is also deeply involved with the history of Japanese language and pedagogical needs and has written Classical Japanese Reader and Essential Dictionary (2007) and Classical Japanese: A Grammar (Columbia University Press, 2005).
Previous books include Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashô (Stanford University Press, 1998) and The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of the Tale of Genji (Stanford University Press, 1987). He also is co-editor with Tomi Suzuki of Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (Stanford University Press, 2001).
Professor Shirane received his BA from Columbia College (1974) and his PhD from Columbia University (1983). He is the recipient of Fulbright, Japan Foundation, SSRC, NEH grants, and has been awarded the Kadokawa Genyoshi Prize, Ishida Hakyo Prize, and most recently the Ueno Satsuki Memorial prize (2010) for outstanding research on Japanese culture.
Tomi Suzuki Professor
Tomi Suzuki is Professor of Japanese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. She received her B.A. (1974), and M.A. (1977), from the University of Tokyo, and her Ph.D. from Yale University (1988). She is a specialist of nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative fiction and criticism, particularly in comparative or trans-national perspective. Her research interests include literary and cultural theory, particularly theories of narrative, gender and genre, modernism and modernity; intellectual and cultural history; history of reading, canon formation, and the study of literary histories. Her most recent research has been on the interrelationship among gender, issues of language, and notions of literature in the modern period.
Her major publications include Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford University Press, 1996) and its Japanese edition, Katarareta jiko: Nihon kindai no shishosetsu gensetsu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2000), the Korean translation of which was published in 2004; Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (Stanford University Press, 2000, author and co-editor); Sozosareta koten: kanon keisei, kokumin kokka, Nihon bungaku (Tokyo: Shin'yosha, 1999, author and co-editor), the Korean translation of which was published in 2002. She is completing a book on gender, language and literary modernism in Japan, investigating the formation of the modern literary field and gender construction from the late 19th-century to the postwar period, and exploring the modernist reconstructions of Japanese literary and linguistic traditions.
Suzuki publishes both in English and Japanese; her recent articles include "The Tale of Genji, National Literature, Language, and Modernism," in Envisioning 'The Tale of Genji': Media, Gender, and Cultural Production (Columbia University Press, June 2008), "Theatrical and Cinematic Imagination and Masochistic Aesthetics: Allure of Gender-Crossing in Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's Early Works," in Tanizaki Junichiro, ou l'ecriture par-dela les frontiers (Tanizaki Junichiro: kyokai o koete, Tokyo: Kasama Shoin, March 2009), and "Transformations and Continuities: on Occupation-Period Criticism:," in Occupation-period Literary Journals: 1946-1947 (Senryoki zasshi shiryo taikei: bungakuhen, Vol.2, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, January 2010).
At Columbia, Suzuki teaches a range of graduate and undergraduate courses on modern Japanese literature and criticism, gender and genre in Japanese literature, literary theory, and Asian humanities (major texts of East Asia and modern East Asian literature).
David Atherton Japanese Literature
David is a Ph.D. candidate in premodern Japanese literature. He studied Chinese literature for his B.A. at Harvard University (2000) and completed an M.A. in classical Thai literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2006). In between, he studied in Beijing, taught English in rural Japan, and attended Chiang Mai University. His dissertation (tentatively titled "Performance and Identity in the Writing, Life, and Legacy of Ihara Saikaku") examines the 17th century poet/playwright/author Saikaku as a figure whose work and life were both intimately bound up with performance, theatricality, and the embodiment of constantly shifting identities--so much so that Saikaku himself was transformed into a contested fictional character immediately after his death. In the dissertation, David hopes to examine the roles of authorship, popular genres, and celebrity as they interact with broader discourses of identity formation and representation in late 17th century Japan. David finds the topic of "performed identity" particularly relevant to this profile, in which he is writing about himself in the third person.
Matthiew Felt Japanese Literature
Matthieu Felt began working on premodern Japanese literature at Columbia in 2010. After finishing his undergraduate program at the University of Chicago, he taught junior high school English for four years on the island of Tanegashima, Kagoshima prefecture. He also worked for several years in IT at the University of Chicago. He is primarily interested in the Nihon Shoki and other imperial histories.
Thomas Gaubatz Japanese Literature
Tom entered the PhD program in Japanese Literature at Columbia in 2009. He is interested broadly in the intersection between linguistic form and literary style, including topics ranging from narratology and poetics to natural language change and cognitive theories of literature. He hopes to use these perspectives to study the literary transformations that took place between the Edo and Meiji periods. After receiving his BS in Mathematics from Stanford University in 2006, Tom spent the interim working in San Francisco's video game industry, and he maintains a furtive interest in the incipient field of game design theory and criticism.
Jennifer Guest Japanese Literature
Jennifer is a Ph.D. candidate in premodern Japanese literature, with interests centered chronologically on the Heian period and including kanbun literature, the reception of Chinese texts and systems of knowledge, and the creative or playful literary juxtaposition of wabun and kanbun styles. She is also interested (even) more broadly in premodern literacies and models for literary education, and in the comparative history of linguistic thought and scholarship. Her dissertation project examines the texts and practices of literary education in premodern Japan and what they reveal about the relationship between kanbun and wabun styles; by reconstructing how literati learned to create and appreciate literature, it will explore the diversity of premodern Japanese literary culture and the role of kanbun as a literary language with both translocal and local, culturally-embedded aspects.
Nan Ma Hartmann Japanese Literature
Nan has lived in Beijing, Tokyo, California before coming to New York City for graduate school. She received her B.S. in Mathematics from Stanford University and M.S. in Economics and Finance from Columbia Business School. Her dissertation project focuses on Japanese adaptations of Chinese prose narratives, from late medieval to early modern period, particularly adaptations of Ming supernatural tales. This thesis explores issues related to vernacularization movement, cultural transformation and worldviews reflected in genre and linguistic development in Japan and China.
Gabriel McNeill Japanese Literature
Gabriel entered the PhD in Japanese Literature in 2010 with the intention of studying the literature of the Nara period in general, and the Kojiki in particular. His research interests range from the representation of kingship, notions of legitimacy, and the rhetoric of rulership in early literature, to the reception and appropriation of early texts as occurred in later periods, didactic tales (setsuwa), myth (shinwa), and the influence of Chinese literature and language on native prose writing (wabun and wakan-konkobun). He holds a BA in Applied Mathematics and an MA in Biostatistics from UC Berkeley, as well as an MA in East Asian Studies from UCLA. While at UCLA he wrote MA papers on the representation of Susanoo in the Kojiki, on selected linguistic aspects (the translation of names, and censorship through partial translation into Latin) of the two main English translations of the Kojiki, and on a Song Dynasty travel account written by Shuqin Su in which he describes his journey to and stay at a Chan Buddhist monastery at Dongting Mountain in Suzhou.
Pau Pitarch Fernandez Japanese Literature
Pau Pitarch received a BA in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (Spain) and an MA in Language and Information Sciences from the University of Tokyo (Japan). His MA thesis dealt with the Taisho era writings of Sato Haruo and their development of European Aestheticism. Pau joined the Japanese Literature PhD program at Columbia University in 2009, to work on early 20th C narrative and criticism. He is interested in the connections between aesthetics and scientific discourse and the uses of "illness" as a literary and ideological trope.
Daniel Poch Japanese Literature
A native from Berlin, Daniel received his M.A. in Japanese Studies, Chinese Studies and German Literature from the University of Heidelberg (2006). His dissertation project with the tentative title "Entangled Literacies: Dynamics of Sino-Japanese Intertextuality and Cultural Translation from the 10th to the Late 19th Century" examines and compares textual "sites" -- literary anthologies from the Heian, Edo and Meiji periods -- in which Chinese (kan) and Japanese (wa) styles, genres and poetic discourses intersect and/or merge. His broader interests also include Western (esp. German and French) literature as well as literary/aesthetic theory and philosophy.
Shibayama Saeko Japanese Literature
A native of Nagoya, Saeko received her B.A. from International Christian University, Tokyo and her M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Toronto. Before turning to Japanese literature and entering EALAC in 2004, she studied Yiddish language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Vilnius University, Lithuania. Her dissertation examines the evolution of waka as a scholastic discipline in the twelfth century.
Closely reading discursive texts (commentaries, treaties, glossaries, anthologies, judges' comments from poetry contests and the inventory of a monastic library), she discusses the revival of the genre during a tumultuous period of rule by retired emperors. The recipient of a Shincho fellowship, she worked in Tokyo 2007-09.
Nathan Shockey Japanese Literature
Nate Shockey is a 5th year Ph.D. student in Modern Japanese Literature. He is currently undertaking research at Waseda University for his dissertation, which deals with changing modes, perceptions, and theories of the act of reading in the age of urban modernity and non-literary media. His research deals with the period ranging from the 1920s to the 1950s, exploring views of material, political, and historical perspectives on reading and writing in the age of the book as commodity in Modern Japan. Specifically, his work covers the dialectics of political and aesthetic avant-gardes in the Proletarian and Neo-Sensationist schools as well as the nascent moments of "sengo bungaku."
Ariel Stilerman Japanese Literature
Ariel Stilerman received his B.A. in Psychology from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina (2002) and his M.A. in Japanese Studies (Literature) from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (2006) with a dissertation on the role of prose contexts in the construction of the traditional poetic canon. He taught Statistics at the University of Buenos Aires (2003-4) and trained in the Tea Ceremony at Urasenke Konnichian, Kyoto (2006-7). He specializes in premodern Japanese literature with a view on completing a thesis on the interaction of poetry and prose in poetic anthologies, narrative, drama, travel diaries, and hybrid genres. He has interest in translating classical Japanese texts into Spanish to help further develop the field of Japanese studies in Latin America and Spain, where he resided for two years. He regularly contributes articles on gastronomic culture to Vinos & Sabores magazine. He sailed competitively while in college and still dreams of one day crossing the Atlantic ocean under sail.
Takai Shiho Japanese Literature
Shiho Takai received her B.A. from University of Tokyo (2004) in British Area Studies and her M.A. from Washington University in St. Louis (2006) in Japanese Literature before joining the Ph.D. program at Columbia University. Her general research interests include gender, genre, performance, reception, supernaturals, censorship, and the formation of cultural legends and heroes. She is now working on her dissertation project on the Edo period theater and law, especially representation of criminal women in sewamono jĹŤruri puppet plays and kabuki, and their relation to the contemporary socio-legal establishment.
Robert Tuck Japanese Literature
I specialize in 19th and 20th century Japanese literature, especially the works of Masaoka Shiki. My dissertation, '€śMasaoka Shiki and the Literature of Dialogue: Media, Sociality and Mass Participation'€ť, traces a major shift in the underpinnings of literary writing during Meiji. Focusing on Shiki and the literary groups and publications with which he was associated during his career, I argue that early Meiji socio-literary practice was structured around social and dialogic poetic exchange, especially within the kanshibun genres and among those who had had a kanbun kyĹŤiku education. During Shiki's career and especially after the Sino-Japanese war, this notion of social dialogue increasingly gave way to a conception of poetry as practiced, read and digested in the pages of the mass-circulation print media, especially the newspaper Nihon; and the literary magazine Hototogisu study of the poets gathering around the latter two publications and their impact on the Meiji literary world makes up the latter half of the dissertation.
Charles Woolley Japanese Literature
Despite hailing from Upstate New York, Charles Woolley headed north to receive his B.A. in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto (2007), after the completion of which he was briefly repatriated before being granted the opportunity to research the development, establishment and institutionalization of the 'family restaurant' format within popular culinary culture in Japan under the auspices of the Fulbright U.S. Student Program (2007-2008). In 2008, he was admitted to Columbia's Ph.D. program in Japanese Literature where he continues to explore his interests in the processes of trans-contextual translation and adaptation between the 'West' and Japan and their roles in the construction and elaboration of new linguistic and discursive idioms in the early twentieth century.
Yasuda Anri Japanese Literature
The working title for my dissertation is "Seeing and Writing: Paradigms of Artistic Vision in Modern Japanese Literature." My particular focus will be on how new modern regimes of information processing and consciousness as fostered particularly by changing conditions of visuality and spatiality brought on by technological advancements and urbanization, conditioned writers' perceptions of themselves as seeing subjects and their ideals of aesthetics. I will concentrate on the late Meiji to early Showa periods, though I am starting to study the contemporary Heisei period as well.
Christina Yi Japanese Literature
Christina Yi graduated from the University of Virginia with a B.A. in Japanese Language & Literature. Shortly after graduation, she left for Japan on the JET Program, working as a Coordinator for International Relations at Hamamatsu City Hall. She entered the Japanese Literature Ph.D. program at Columbia in 2007. Her research focuses on the rise of Japanese-language literature by Korean colonial subjects during the 1930s and 1940s and its subsequent impact on discourse regarding "national" and "ethnic minority" literature in postwar Japan and Korea. She is particularly interested in the relationship between nihongo bungaku (Japanese-language literature) and kokubungaku (Japanese national literature) vis-Ă -vis the canonization(s) of zainichi Korean literature(s).
Yoshio Hitomi Japanese Literature
Hitomi received her B.A. in English at Yale University (2001) and an M.A. in English at the University of Tokyo (2005). She is now a Ph.D. candidate in modern Japanese literature at Columbia University. Her dissertation examines Japanese literary modernism from the interrelated perspectives of gender, urban space and translation culture, in the context of the developing publishing industry and mass media in the 1920s and 30s. She is currently in Japan doing her dissertation research at Waseda University (2009-10).
Chi Zhang Japanese Literature
Chi is a PhD student in Japanese Literature, with interests broadly centered on the construction of China in the Japanese literary and cultural imagination, including the transformation of Chinese philosophical and religious writings in Japanese literature and the use of different genres in the depiction of Chinese images, and the ways in which different Japanese genres bonded with specific Chinese "sources" or genres, mostly from the Heian through the medieval period. She is also interested in examining the Edo period in which a number of earlier threads of Japanese cultural and discursive constructions of China were first brought together and emerged within a range of new forms of writing and texts. Chi received her B.A. in Japanese Language from Tsinghua University, Beijing before joining Columbia.
Satoko Naito 2010. “The Making of Murasaki Shikibu: Constructing Authorship, Gendering Readership, and Legitimizing The Tale of Genji.” University of Maryland.
Mathew Thompson 2009. “The Tales of Yoshitsune: A Study of Genre, Narrative Paradigms, and Cultural Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Japan.” Sophia University, Tokyo.
Satoko Shimazaki 2008. “Shadows of Jealousy: Nanboku’s Yotsuya kaidan and the Tradition of Female Ghosts in Japanese Culture.” University of Colorado
Kerim Yasar. 2008. "Electrified Voices: Media Technology and Discourse in Modern Japan." Society of Fellows, Princeton University
Michael Emmerich 2007. “Replacing The Text: Translation, Canonization, Censorship, and The Tale of Genji.” University of California at St. Barbara
Scott Lineberger 2007. The Genesis of Haikai: Transforming the Japanese Poetic Tradition Through Parody, Defamiliarization, and Ambiguity.” Beloit College
Akiko Takeuchi 2007. “Ritual, Storytelling, and Zeami’s Reformation of Noh Drama: Issues in Representation and Performance.” Hosei University
Jack Stoneman 2006. “Constructing Saigyo: Poetry, Biography, and Medieval Reception.” Brigham Young University
Torquil Duthie 2005. “Poetry and Kingship in Ancient Japan.” UCLA
Christina Laffin 2005. “Women, Travel, and Cultural Production in Kamakura Japan: A Socio-Literary Analysis of Izayoi nikki and Towazugatari.” University of British Columbia
Jamie Newhard 2005. “Genre, Secrecy, and The Book: A History of Late Medieval and Early Modern Literary Scholarship on Ise Monogatari.” Washington University at St. Louis.
Satoru Saito 2005. Allegories of Detective Fiction: Confession, Social Mobility, and the Modern Japanese Novel, 1880-1930.” Rutgers University
Anne Commons 2003. “The Canonization of Hitomaro: Paradigm of the Poet as God.” University of Alberta, Canada.
Peter Flueckiger 2003. “Poetry, Culture, and Social Harmony in Eighteenth Century Japanese Thought: The Sorai School and Its Critics.” Pomona College
Indra Levy 2002. “Sirens of the Western Shore: Westernesque Women and Translation in Modern Japanese Literature.” Stanford University
Jonathan Zwicker 2002. “Tears of Blood: Melodrama, The Novel, and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan.” University of Michigan
Cheryl Crowley 2001. “Haikai Poet Yosa Buson and the Back to Basho Movement.” Emory University
Naomi Fukumori 2001. “Reading Makura no Soshi (Pillow Book) in Historical Perspective.” Ohio State University
David Lurie 2001. “The Origins of Writing in Early Japan: From the 1st to the 8th Century C.E.” Columbia University
Gustav Heldt 2000. “Composing Courtiers: Ki no Tsurayuki’s Poetic Visions of Gender, Writing, and Rituals at the Heian Court.” University of Virginia
James Keith Vincent 2000. “Writing Sexuality: Heteronormitivity, Homophobia, and the Homosocial Subject in Modern Japan.” Boston University
Pammy Eddinger 1999. “From Obsession to Deliverance: The Evolving Landscape of the Feminine Psyche in the Works of Enchi Fumiko.” Moorepark College
Christopher Hill 1999. “National History and the World of Nations: Writing Japan, France, and the United States, 1870-1900.” Yale University
David Bialock 1997. “Peripheries of Power: Voice, History and the Construction of Imperial and Sacred Space in the Tale of Heike and Other Medieval and Heian Historical Texts.” University of Southern California
John Carpenter 1997. “Fujiwara no Yukinari and the Development of Heian Court Calligraphy.” SOAS, London
Kevin Collins 1997. “Seizing Spirits: The Chinkon Ritual and Early Japanese Literature.” Wakayama University, Japan.
Seiji Lippit 1997. “Japanese Modernism and the Destruction of Literary Form: The Writings of Akutagawa, Yokomitsu, and Kawabata.” UCLA
Eve Zimmerman 1997. “The Language of Rebellion: Myth, Violence, and Identity in the Fiction of Nakagami Kenji.” Wellesley College
Peipei Qiu 1994. “Basho and the Dao : Zhuangzi and the transformation of Haikai.” Vassar College
Takashi Wakui 1994. "Prosody, Diction, and Lyricism in Modern Japanese Poetry." Nagoya University
Joan Ericson 1993. “Hayashi Fumiko and Japanese Women’s Literature.” Colorado College
Steven Dodd 1993. “An Embracing Vision: Representation of the Countryside in Early 20th Century Japanese Literature.” School of Oriental and African Studies, London
Nina Cornyetz 1991.“Izumi Kyoka’s Speculum:Reflections on Medusa, Thanatos, and Eros.” New York University
Masaaki Kinugasa Hosei University
