Chair, Department of Comparative Literature; Professor of Modern Japanese Studies and Comparative Literature
About
Languages: English, Japanese, French, Italian, bad German
Affiliations: Asian Languages and Cultures
Teaching interests: I teach about the novel as a literary form, in local and global frames; transnational intellectual history; modernism and modernity; modern Japanese fiction; and Japanese cultural history.
Recent courses:
- ASIAN 302, Modern Japanese Fiction
- ASIAN 312, After Defeat: The Cultures of Postwar Japan
- ASIAN 321, Make It New: Modernism and Modern Life in Japan
- ASIAN 550, Critical Introduction to Asian Studies
- ASIAN 590, Japan in Twentieth-Century Asia
Research interests: I write about the flow of ideas and literary forms around the world in the modern age. I do research on the travel of genres such as the novel, the universalization of concepts such as "civilization" and "culture," the history of nationalist thought, and Japanese intellectuals' views of Asia in the post-imperial postwar era. My training is in comparative literature and intellectual history, from the nineteenth century to the present. I have done a lot of research on Japan, France, and the United States—always in a global context—which was the foundation for my first two books. Recently I have been focusing on Afro-Asianist anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements in the 1950s and 1960s, and Japanese writers' work for groups like the Afro-Asian Writers Association. I have gradually been writing articles for a project called "Japanese Writers in the Bandung Moment."
Book publications:
Other publications:
- “American Naturalism’s Worldly History,” New Centennial Review 20:3 (Winter 2020)
- “Misreading Provincializing Europe,” Práticas da História 11 (2020)
- “Haven’t We Met? On the Scales of Comparison,” Verge 3:2 (Fall 2017) (Or read the full “critical renga” on Asia and Latin America edited by Andrea Bachner and Christpher Bush)
- “Crossed Geographies: Endô and Fanon in Lyon,” Representations 128 (Fall 2014)
- “Conceptual Universalization in the Transnational Nineteenth Century,” Global Intellectual History, ed. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013)
- “Nana in the World: Novel, Gender, and Transnational Form,” Modern Language Quarterly 72.1 (Mar. 2011)
- “The Travels of Naturalism and the Challenges of a World Literary History,” Literature Compass 6.6 (Nov. 2009)
- “What’s the Matter with Saying ‘The Orient’?,” About Japan (Japansociety.org), (Mar. 2009)
- “Exhausted by Their Battles with the World: Neurasthenia and Civilization Critique in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,” Perversion and Modern Japan: Experiments in Psychoanalysis, ed. Nina Cornyetz and Keith Vincent (London: Routledge, 2009)
- “The Naturalist Novel and the Boundaries of Japanese Literature,” Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies 9 (2009)
- “How to Write a Second Restoration: The Political Novel and Meiji Historiography,” Journal of Japanese Studies 33.2 (Summer 2007)
- “Mori Ôgai’s Resentful Narrator: Trauma and the National Subject in ‘The Dancing Girl’,” Positions 10.2 (Fall 2002)
- “National Histories and World Systems: Writing Japan, France, the United States,” Turning Points in Historiography: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Q. Edward Wang and Georg G. Iggers (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002)
- “Fashizumu to hyôshô no shutai–Maruyama, Adoruno, yûtopia [Fascism and the Subject of Representation: Maruyama, Adorno, Utopia],” trans. Takeuchi Takahiro, Hihyô kûkan 2.4 (Jan. 1995)
