Literature

Lili Xia

Lili Xia

Assistant Professor of Premodern Chinese Literature, Barnard College

Office:  317 Milbank Hall, Barnard College
Office Hours: T 4:10–6:00pm & by appointment

Email:  lxia@barnard.edu

Educational Background

BA: Fudan University

MA: Fudan University

PhD: Princeton University

Classes Taught

AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia

Research Interests

Lili Xia is a scholar of premodern Chinese literature. Her broader research interests include Sino-steppe interactions, cultural memory, print and book culture, intermediality, and digital humanities.

She is now working on her book project titled “North against South in Middle Period China: Classical Poetry and Literati Culture under Jurchen Jin Rule (1115–1234).” By demonstrating a rival narrative of claiming China in the Sino-Jurchen North against the cultural orthodoxy conceptualized in the Han Chinese-ruled South, the book illustrates the burgeoning literati culture under Jurchen rule, and fleshes out the Jin poetic production in particular. While making full use of Jin literary texts, this book is further enriched by art history and material culture, as well as digital tools of social network and geographic analysis to better represent Jin literati culture on the whole. Her research aims to reveal the heterotopia and heteroglossia of China as an intersubjective, transcultural, and border-crossing space in the Middle Period (800–1400 CE).

Before coming to Barnard, she received her B.A. and M.A. in Classical Chinese Literature at Fudan University, and her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies at Princeton University. She was the 2023–24 Louis Frieberg Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Selected Publications

“Qiuchi as Heterotopia: The Other Space for Su Shi.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 142.1 (2022): 93–119.

Review of Stephen Owen, All Mine! Happiness, Ownership, and Naming in Eleventh-Century China. The Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 85.2 (2022): 325–27.

“Two Narratives of ‘Grand Peace’ in Northern Song Historiography and Cultural Memory of Song Contemporaries” (北宋仁、徽兩朝的“太平敍事”與宋人文化記憶). Zhonghua wenshi luncong (Journal of Chinese Literature and History) 139 (2020): 219–40. (in Chinese)

Tomi Suzuki

Tomi Suzuki

Professor of Japanese Literature, Director of Graduate Studies

Office: 410 Kent Hall
Office Hours: T 4:30-5:30 PM (by appointment) or by appointment
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 U3830 Colloquium on Modern East Asian Texts
JPNS GU4008 Readings in Classical Japanese
JPNS GR9020 Graduate Seminar in Modern Japanese Literature

Research Interests

Modern Japanese Literature and Criticism in Comparative Context, Literary and Cultural Theory, Narrative, Genre, and Gender Theory, Modernism and Modernity, Intellectual History of Modern Japan, History of Reading

Professor Suzuki joined the department at Columbia University in 1996. She has published extensively in both the English and Japanese languages.  Currently, Professor 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 gender construction, language reform, and education. It explores the modernist construction and questioning of Japanese linguistic and cultural traditions in a transnational context. Most recently, she co-edited The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature.

Selected Publications

The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature (co-editor, Cambridge, 2016).

“Translations and Modern Japanese Literature: Re-reading Mori Ogai’s Maihime at Columbia University,” Bungaku (2014, in Japanese)

“Transformations and Continuities: Censorship and Occupation-Period Criticism,” in Occupation-period Literary Journals: 1946–1947, vol. 2 (Iwanami Shoten, 2010, in Japanese)

Censorship, Media, and Literary Culture in Japan (author and co-editor, Shin’yōsha, 2012)

Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (author and co-editor, Stanford University, 2001)

Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford, 1996)

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 spring 2020 semester
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)