Gian Piero Persiani

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, at both local and transnational levels. My first 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. I am also co-editor of Waka Culture and Japan: Beginnings to Modern Times (forthcoming from Brill). 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 ongoing projects include a study of the writings of the courtier and polymath Fujiwara no Kintō and a multimedia 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.