Assistant Professor of Pre-modern Japanese Literature
About
Current research interests:
I came to the study of medieval Japan via a winding path—from an undergraduate degree in German to three years on the JET Program in Osaka Prefecture, a second BA in Japanese, and an MA in Chinese, before finally settling on the literature and historiography of late-twelfth- through fourteenth-century Japan as my area of primary research for my doctoral dissertation. I suspect that it is in some part a result of these wanderings that I am particularly interested in issues of language and identity as well as the circulation of texts, motifs, and intellectual traditions both within and beyond Japan.
For me, these questions are of special resonance within a context of disorder—when societies are falling apart or regimes are being newly established, issues of how to strike the balance between normative and revolutionary or how the discourse of legitimacy from a displaced regime can be deployed to empower its replacement take on additional urgency. I am fascinated by how people use languages and texts to construct order out of chaos or to make claims to authority.
Current projects:
In my forthcoming monograph, Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre (Harvard University Asia Center, 2020), I investigate the larger question of what writing a history in medieval Japan meant. This includes an examination of how time itself was conceptualized in the medieval period, looking in particular at the variety of ways the relationship between past and present was envisioned and the tension resulting from changing notions of authenticity/proximity and authority.
I have also begun a second project that looks at the ways that medieval and/or early modern Japanese, Chinese, and German texts circulated anew in the context of the 1930’s and 1940’s as purported means of cultural introduction, exchange, or mediation between Germany and Japan.
Teaching interests:
Both my undergraduate and graduate courses tend to have a cross-cultural focus—these include courses on Japan’s cross-cultural ‘encounters’ with China & Europe, pre-modern Chinese & Japanese literature of the strange, pre-modern Japanese representations of China, and literature of the imperial period, including works produced in Taiwan, Japan, Taiwan and Germany.
