Amherst College

My research interests encompass the middle of the eighteenth century through the 1930s.  This is a period of immense upheaval in Japan, one that witnesses the rise of a commercial economy, the encounter with the West, the audacious program of modernization implemented in the wake of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and the transformation of the country by the forces of industrialization and urbanization.  My research in this period follows three broad lines of inquiry: first, I’m interested in the memory of the past in a new age, that is for the space “in between” eras; second, I’m interested in how literature reflects and responds to forces changing society; third, I’m interested in forms of literary criticism that removes literature from isolation and puts it in contact with other arts and with the larger social world more generally.  My early research centered on the pioneering woman writer Higuchi Ichiyo, which resulted in the monograph The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in the Fiction of Higuchi Ichiyo.  My current book project, Struggling Upward: Worldly Success and the Japanese Novel, takes up the role played by new discourses on social mobility in the formation of the spatial imagination of the modern novel.  One chapter has appeared in print as an independent essay: "A Utopia of Self-Help: Imagining Rural Japan in the Meiji-Era Novels of Ambition" (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, June 2010).  A future project, tentatively titled Celluloid Metaphors: Japanese Literature in the Age of Cinema, will seek to uncover the connections between literature and new technological cultureal forms, especially the cinema, during the 1920s and 30s.