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David Atherton My research concerns Japanese
medieval narratives and oral traditions,
particularly honji-mono, which recount the lives of
gods and buddhas during a time when they lived as
human beings. More broadly, I am interested in late
medieval popular fiction and storytelling (otogi-zōshi,
sekkyōbushi) and drama, as well as Buddhist
anecdotal literature. At some point, I would like to
engage in comparative work on the intersection
between Buddhism and literature in East and
Southeast Asia, using my academic background in Thai
literature.
Jennifer Guest My interests center on
questions of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic
interaction, particularly the reception of Chinese
texts and Chinese knowledge in Heian and Kamakura
Japan; I am interested in the perspectives on China
and the Chinese language that emerge from a range of
premodern texts, especially wakan texts that make
creative use of multiple literary styles. I am
planning a dissertation project that will examine
the cultural and literary impact of introductory
kanbun primers in early Japan -- the ways in which
these beginning textbooks mediate the reception of
Chinese cultural material, and the implications of
this process for the relationship between wa- and
kan-style elements in early Japanese society.
Nan Ma Hartman My research interests are
cross-cultural comparison of classical Chinese and
Japanese texts, intertextuality, Japanese reception
and canonization of Chinese texts, the influence of
Six Dynasties and Tang poetry (such as Bo Juyi) on
Heian literature, and the impact of Ming-Qing
vernacular fiction and criticism on 19th century
Japanese prose literature.
Robert Hewitt My dissertation research
revolves around the late yomi-hon; historical novels
from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I am
particularly interested in the function of
didacticism and allegorical composition, the role of
government censorship, and influence of Chinese
vernacular fiction in works by such authors as Ueda
Akinari, Takebe Ayatari, Santō Kyōden, and Kyokutei
Bakin.
Satoko Naito I am interested in the reception
of classical Japanese monogatari literature,
particularly as it relates to women’s education and
the formation of the notion of ‘author.’ My
dissertation examines these issues by focusing on
the Edo-period reception of The Tale of Genji and
The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu.
Gian Piero Persiani My research interests are
in classical Japanese poetry and, more generally, in collective,
organized forms of cultural production. I look at
how the interaction of a broad range of human,
material, and discursive elements drives and
sustains large-scale cultural phenomena. My
dissertation deals with one of the great instances
of collective literary efflorescence in antiquity: waka poetry in the mid to late-tenth century.
Daniel Poch My current interests are in the
history of literary criticism and the concept of
'literature' and 'literary' practice from mid-Edo to
Meiji Japan.
Saeko Shibayama In my dissertation,
“Shinkokin wakashū: Reconstructing Japanese Cultural
Identity Through a Thirteenth Century Imperial
Poetry Anthology,” I show how the Shinkokinshū
reconstructed a literary history of waka through a
montage narrative of two thousand poems. By
examining both individual poems and sequences on the
four seasons, travel, mourning, love, religion and
other topics, I explore how the Shinkokin compilers
interwove their understanding of the historical
development of the genre with their ideological view
of the social history of Japan at the dawn of the
medieval period.
Satoko Shimazaki My dissertation “Yotsuya
kaidan and the Cultural Imagination of Ghosts in
Early Nineteenth-Century Japanese Theater and
Literature” deals with the meaning of female ghosts
in the late Tokugawa period, and with the
intertwined performative, visual, and textual
contexts of nineteenth century cultural production
out of which these ghosts emerged. My interests
include kabuki theater and its interactions with
narrative fiction, performance and textual theory,
actor prints, and Tokugawa period adaptations of
Chinese vernacular fiction.
Nate Shockey I am currently developing a
project that explores the roles of body and
technology in mediating experiences of life and
literature in the 1920s through the 1950s. My
research focuses on the fiction and criticism of the
Neo Sensationists and writers of proletarian
literature, as well as the urban ethnography of
Yanagita Kunio. My dissertation is tentatively
titled "Body Shock: Technologies of Reading and
Literary Violence in Japan 1920 - 1950.
Shiho Takai My main interest is Japanese
court culture and women writers from the Nara, Heian,
and Kamakura periods, and the reception and
reconstruction of the images of court culture and
women writers in later periods.
Zane Torretta I am researching comic
literature in the Edo period and its effects on the
wider cultural and literary world of the time. My
current dissertation title is "Hanashibon and the
City: Storytelling and the Urban Imagination in
Early Modern Japan."
Robert Tuck I specialize in 19th and 20th
century Japanese literature, especially the works of
Natsume Soseki, Mori Ogai, and Masaoka Shiki. My
research looks at how these and other authors
negotiated the transition from kanbun to wabun-based
modes of education during their formative years,
examining how Japanese, Chinese and Western ideas of
literary genre, particularly haiku, kanshi and the
novel, were in dialogue with differing pedagogical
models and with changing ideas of what it meant to
be literate. I also focus on the literary archetypes
created by this process, as well as the role of
school textbooks in the creation and re-imagining of
literary and cultural icons.
Kerim Yasar My dissertation, “Electrified
Voices: Media Technology and Discourse in Modern
Japan,” explores some of the ways in which
technologies such as the telegraph, telephone,
phonograph, cinema, radio, and the Internet have
transformed cultural practice and political ideology
in Japan from the Meiji Era to the present. Varied
topics such as the genbun itchi movement, rajio
taisô “radio exercise,” and the temporal “leveling”
of the Internet inform a larger consideration of the
dynamic balance among textuality, visuality, and
aurality/orality in the media ecology, as well as
the role of the Lacanian “voice” therein.
Anri Yasuda 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 My research interests are modern
Japanese literature written by Resident Koreans;
early 20th century discourse on Japanese imperialism
and colonial identity; postcolonial studies in an
East Asian context.
Hitomi Yoshio I am interested in the impact
of the new fields of psychology and
sexuality on the development of Japanese literary
modernism from the 1900s to the mid-1930s. Focusing
on the aspect of gender and narrative voice, I
examine the impact of European aesthetic modernism
in the Japanese context in relation to the larger
cultural formation.The working title of my
dissertation is "Psychology, Sexuality and
Japanese Literary Modernism: Natsume Sôseki to Ozaki
Midori".
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