Yiwen Shen

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Email:ys2473@columbia.edu

Yiwen is a Ph.D. student in classical Japanese literature. She received her B.A. in Chinese Literature from Fudan University, Shanghai (2008), M.A. in Japanese Literature from Columbia (2011), and M.A. in Chinese Literature from University of Wisconsin-Madison (2012). Her fields of interest include Japanese and Chinese literature, with particular focus on medieval narrative prose. She hopes to examine the common ground and shared nuances of the relevant accounts in China and Japan by paying close heed to their original historical milieu, even while tracing the religious context and visual representations of them. Currently she is conducting research on the literary and visual analyses of the netherworld and influential death-related icons in the early Japanese setsuwa collections from the Nara through the medieval period.