The Medieval Studies Institute

I am a scholar of Japanese literature, specializing in the poetry and poetics of the period between 900 and 1500. My work as a literary historian generally examines how poems arise from, shape, and circulate beyond their occasioning circumstances. I am particularly interested in exploring the internal heterogeneity of the premodern literary tradition, looking at marginal, alternative modes of meaning-making that have often been obscured by later constructions of the premodern past. As a scholar of poetics, I tend to frame Japanese poetry in broadly comparative terms, asking how local practices of poem-making fit into the broader East Asian world and into global histories of poetry. These interests animate my first book project, tentatively entitled Difficult Realities: Poetic Countertraditions in Japan, 960-1479, which follows a transhistorical, translingual, and transnational lineage of poets as they put inherited courtly forms to unconventional uses under conditions of ongoing precarity.

 

Originally trained as a comparatist and literary theorist, I maintain an interest in transregional practices of comparison, especially conversations around lyric poetics and medieval manuscript cultures. I am also a practicing literary translator.