Personal profile

Personal profile

My goal as a historian of ancient literatures and cultures is to bring to light the richness and complexity of premodern literary and artistic phenomena. My research explores the structure of the cultural field at specific points in time, as well as patterns of development over time through practices of reception, appropriation, and adaptation, on both local and transnational scales. My forthcoming book Poets, Patrons, and the Public: Poetry as Cultural Phenomenon in Courtly Japan (Brill, 2025) is a study of the great flourishing of waka poetry in the tenth century. My current book project is a study of the interplay of cosmopolitan and vernacular cultures in medieval East Asia, with a particular focus on the role played by understandings of space and place in shaping attitudes toward language and identity. Other projects include a study of the writings of the courtier and polymath Fujiwara no Kintō and a history of the reception of the Thirty-six Poetry Immortals (sanjūrokkasen). Before coming to Illinois, I taught at Oxford University and was Resident Foreign Researcher at the National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL) in Tokyo.

Research Interests

Origins, structure, and development of the literary field
Reception and uses of Sinitic culture in Japan
Waka poetry and poetics
Medieval, early-modern, and modern reception of Heian literature
East Asian literary cultures
History of East-West encounters

Education

PhD Columbia University

Teaching

EALC 398 Writers and Sino-Japanese Cultural Interaction 600-1900
EALC/CWL 275 Masterpieces of East Asian Literature
EALC 305 Premodern Japanese Literature in Translation I
JAPN 407 Introduction to Classical Japanese
JAPN 408 Readings in Classical Japanese
EALC/CWL 230 Popular Cultures of Contemporary East Asia
EALC 199 Adaptation and Appropriation in Japanese Cultural History
EALC 550 - Itineraries in Waka Culture

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