Yuki Ishida

Lecturer and Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University

Email: yi2182@columbia.edu

Office Hours: W 4-5 PM and by appointment

Educational Background:

BA: University of Tokyo (’06)

MA: Saint Petersburg State University (’15)

PhD: Columbia University (’22)

Classes Taught:

Fall 2022: AHUM UN3830: Colloquium on Modern East Asian Texts

Spring 2023: TBA

Research interests:

Modern Japanese literature and criticism; the intellectual and cultural history of modern Japan; translation studies; literary and cultural theory in comparative context; modern Russian literature and Russo-Japanese literary relations.

Yuki Ishida is a scholar of Japanese literature and culture whose research focuses on modern literature, criticism, and translation. She received her PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in 2022. Her doctoral dissertation, titled “Envisioning Literary Modernity through Translation: Futabatei Shimei and the Formation of Modern Literary Discourse in 1880s–1910s Japan,” examines how translation helped to forge and in turn problematized the literary-artistic values and evaluative criteria of the Japanese language reforms taking place in the 1880s–1910s. Focusing on the work of the writer and Russian–Japanese translator Futabatei Shimei (c. 1862/1864–1909), her project reveals the complex interrelations between translation practice, the formation of evaluative criteria for modern Japanese literature, and language reform—a process with long-lasting ramifications on the shaping of the discourse surrounding literary modernity. In addition to preparing her dissertation as a book, she is pursuing a second project, which extends her inquiry into the Taishō and early Shōwa periods (1910s–1930s). Its major focuses are the transformative role of translation in the introduction and impact of Russian literary and artistic theories and movements on Japanese aesthetic discourse, covering not only texts but also visual media, such as cinema. This project also explores the increasing significance of the work of Dostoevsky in the period, which was avidly translated, becoming a locus of discussion on what constitutes literary modernity.