Biography
I work, broadly speaking, on postwar Japanese literature, culture, and thought. My research is motivated by problems of philosophical aesthetics and affect, reception and circulation, and translation. I pursue these problems as they are manifested not only in more typical literary texts but also across performance, architecture, and criticism as a self-sufficient object of analysis.
Much of my PhD work has centered on the Japanese writer Ōe Kenzaburō. Emanating out of that work, my dissertation project hopes to unearth the broader formations of artists and intellectuals with which Ōe is in dialogue in Japan and beyond. In reconsidering the cultural networks in which Ōe is enmeshed, my aim is to shed new light on the way that postwar modernisms and structuralisms together with their institutions are understood, while also extending and reframing contemporary debates around “postcritique” in the U.S. academy. Finally, a distinct but not discrete avenue of my research focuses on Muromachi-period nō and its global and transmedial afterlives in the 20th century. For example, what would it mean to take seriously nō and nō aesthetics, often neglected by scholars of modern Japan, within a postwar media ecology?
As a joint degree student working at the crossroads of East Asian studies and Comparative Literature, I pay special attention to cultivating interdisciplinary methodologies and transnational approaches throughout my work. My research is shaped by a longstanding engagement with discourses of comparative literature and world literature, and takes particular interest in how these discourses invoke (or, more often until the recent past, excluded) East Asia.