Japanese Literature & Visual Culture

Christina Yi

Christina Yi

Associate Professor of Japanese Literature

Office: 408 Kent Hall
Email: csy2103@columbia.edu

Educational Background:

BA: University of Virginia (’05)
MA: Columbia University (’09)
PhD: Columbia University (’13)

Classes Taught:

AHUM UN3830 Colloquium on Modern East Asian Texts
JPNS GU4008 Readings in Classical Japanese
JPNS GR9020 Graduate Seminar in Modern Japanese Literature

Research Interests:

Christina Yi is a scholar of modern and contemporary Japanese literature and culture, with a research focus on issues of postcoloniality, genre and narrative theory, language politics, and cultural studies. Her first monograph, Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea (Columbia University Press, 2018), investigated how linguistic nationalism and national identity intersect in the formation of modern literary canons through an examination of Japanese-language cultural production by Korean and Japanese writers from the 1930s through the 1950s. The research and writing of this project was funded through generous grants from the Northeast Asia Council of AAS, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), among others. Her current research project investigates the discursive formation and theoretical limits of “repatriation literature” (hikiage bungaku) through an examination of fiction, essays, and memoirs on the subject of repatriation to Japan, by both Japanese and non-Japanese writers. This project was funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant and Japan Foundation fellowship. Professor Yi is also an active translator, and was a recipient of the William F. Sibley Memorial Translation Prize for her translation of Kim Saryang’s “Pegasus” (Tenma).

Selected Publications:

Sole author: Imperial Testaments: Repatriation Narratives in Modern Japan (advance contract at Columbia University Press)

Co-editor: Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan’s East Asia Empire (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023)

Translator: Kim Sŏkpŏm, Death of a Crow (Karasu no shi; Seoul Selection, 2022)

Co-editor: “Zainichi Literature and Film” in Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture 12 (2019)

Sole author: Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea (Columbia University Press, 2018)

Tomi Suzuki

Tomi Suzuki

Professor of Japanese Literature, Faculty Curriculum Advisor

Office: 410 Kent Hall
Office Hours: On leave 2026-27
Phone: (212) 854-5034
Email: ts202@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: University of Tokyo (’74)
MA: University of Tokyo (’77)
PhD: Yale University (’88)

Classes Taught

AHUM UN3830: Colloquium on Modern East Asian Texts
JPNS GU4008: Readings in Classical Japanese: from Heian to Meiji
EAAS GU4810: Women and Literary Culture in Japan: from 10th century to the present
JPNS GR8020: Graduate Seminar in Modern Japanese Literature

Research Interests

Modern Japanese literature, especially 19th-and 20th-century narrative fiction and criticism in a comparative and transnational perspective; literary and cultural theory, particularly theory of narrative, genre and gender, modernism and modernity, translation and adaptation; intellectual history of modern Japan; linguistic thought and language education in 19th-and 20th-century Japan; history of reading, issues of canon formation and literary histories.

Professor Suzuki joined the department at Columbia University in 1996. She has published extensively in both the English and Japanese languages. Currently, Tomi Suzuki is completing a book entitled Gender, Literary Culture, and Nation in Japan: 1880s-1950s, which investigates the formation of the literary field from the late nineteenth century to the postwar period in relationship to the process of nation building, gender construction, journalism, language reform and education. It explores the modernist construction and questioning of Japanese linguistic and cultural traditions in a transnational context. She co-edited The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature. She is now co-editing a volume entitled Rethinking Authorship in Comparative and Historical Perspectives: Transmission, Ownership, and Collectivity (forthcoming). The Japanese edition was published by Iwanami Shoten in 2021.

Selected Publications

Gender, Literary Culture, and Nation in Japan: 1880s-1950s (forthcoming).

Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity, Stanford University Press, 1996 [Japanese translation, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2000; Korean translation, Seoul: Saengak-ui-namu Publishing, 2004]

What is an Author?: Transmission, Ownership, and Collectivity (<Sakusha> to wa nani ka: keishō,senyū, kyōdōsei), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2021 (co-editor)

Cambridge History of Japanese Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2016 (co-editor)

Censorship, Media, and Literary Culture in Japan (Bilingual Edition), Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2012 (co-editor)

Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, Stanford University Press, 2000 (co-editor)

Sôzôsareta koten: kanon keisei, kokumin kokka, nihon bungaku (Invented Classics: Canon Formation, Nation-State, and Japanese Literature), Tokyo: Shin’yôsha, 1999 (co-editor) [Korean translation, Seoul: Somyong Publishing Co, 2002; Chinese translation, Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2021]

Haruo Shirane

Haruo Shirane

Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature, Vice Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Faculty Director of the Donald Keene Center

Office: 420 Kent Hall
Office Hours: On leave for the 2026-2027 academic year
Phone: (212) 854-5031
Email: hs14@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Columbia College (’74)
MA: University of Michigan (’77)
PhD: Columbia University (’83)

Classes Taught

JPNS GU4007 Introduction to Classical Japanese
JPNS GR8040 Graduate Seminar in Premodern Japanese Literature

Research Interests

Japanese Literature, Print Culture, Performance and Media

Haruo Shirane, Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, teaches and writes on premodern and early modern Japanese literature and culture, with particular interest in prose fiction, poetry, performative genres (such as storytelling and theater), and visual culture. He is finishing a book called Media, Performance, and Play: Japanese Culture from Outside In, which focuses on the role of manuscript culture, media, vocality, and performance, viewing cultural processes from the social periphery. Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons (Columbia University Press, 2012) explored the cultural constructions of nature across a wide spectrum of literature, media, and visual arts from the ancient period to the modern. Most recently, he has coedited Monsters, Animals, and Other Worlds: A Collection of Short Medieval Tales (Columbia University Press, 2018); Reading The Tale of Genji: The First Millennium(Columbia University Press, 2015); and Cambridge History of Japanese Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Haruo Shirane has been engaged in bringing new approaches to the study of Japanese literary culture. This has resulted in Japanese Literature and Literary Theory (Nihon bungaku kara no hihyo riron, Kasama shoin, 2009, edited with Fujii Sadakazu and Matsui Kenji) and New Horizons in Japanese Literary Studies (Bensei Publishing, 2009), both of which explore new issues and methodologies in the study of print and literary culture. He also edited Food in Japanese Literature (Shibundo, 2008), Overseas Studies on The Tale of Genji (Ofu, 2008) and Envisioning The Tale of Genji: Media, Gender, and Cultural Production (Columbia University Press, 2008). The latter two books analyze the impact of The Tale of Genji on Japanese cultural history in multiple genres and historical periods.

Haruo Shirane translated and edited a number of volumes on Japanese literature. These include Classical Japanese Literature, An Anthology: Beginnings to 1600 (Columbia University Press, 2006), Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900 (Columbia University Press, 2002; abridged edition, 2008), The Tales of the Heike (Columbia University Press, 2006, paperback 2008), and The Demon at Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales (Columbia University Press, 2010), a collection of setsuwa (anecdotal literature).

He is also deeply involved with the history of Japanese language and pedagogical needs and have written Classical Japanese Reader and Essential Dictionary (2007) and Classical Japanese: A Grammar (Columbia University Press, 2005).

Haruo Shirane is the recipient of Fulbright, Japan Foundation, SSRC, NEH, and Hakuhodo grants, and has been awarded the Kadokawa Genyoshi Prize, Ishida Hakyo Prize, and most recently the Ueno Satsuki Memorial prize (2010) for outstanding research on Japanese culture. He is presently the Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.

Professor’s Shirane’s personal website

Selected Publications

Cambridge History of Japanese Literature (chief editor, Cambridge, 2015)

Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons (Columbia, 2012)

Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (co-editor with Tomi Suzuki, 2001).

Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashô (Stanford, 1998)

The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of the Tale of Genji (Stanford, 1987)