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 10^th century to the present
JPNS GR8020: Graduate Seminar in Modern Japanese Literature

Research Interests

Modern Japanese literature, especially 19^th-and 20^th-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 19^th-and 20^th-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]