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Home  > Areas of Research Excellence

Faculty in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Alberta conduct research and teach at the undergraduate and graduate levels across a number of fields and disciplines, including Taiwan literature, Japanese cultural studies, Chinese literature (particularly premodern), premodern Japanese literature, Japanese linguistics/pedagogy, East Asian religions and East Asian art history. However, the department has concentrations of faculty research specialisations in several areas, in which we particularly welcome interest from undergraduate and graduate students: these are premodern Japanese studies, Chinese literature, and Japanese linguistics/pedagogy.

 

 

In addition to its wide range of undergraduate courses in premodern Japanese literature, religion, and culture, the University of Alberta is one of only a few institutions in North America to offer a graduate program on premodern Japan. Our focus is inter-disciplinary, allowing students to engage with this fascinating culture through a variety of disciplinary approaches, including art history, history, literature, and religion. We also offer training in advanced and classical Japanese as well as in Sino-Japanese (kanbun) to prepare our students for independent research.

 

Mikael Adolphson (Ph.D., Stanford, 1996)

Professor Mikael Adolphson was trained as a historian, but employs a multi-disciplinary approach in his research, which focuses on social, ideological and cultural developments in the Heian (794-1185) and Kamakura (1185-1333) periods. He has published two books, The Gates of Power: Monks, Courtiers, and Warriors in premodern Japan and The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha: Monastic Warriors and Sohei in Japanese History, and co-edited Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries. His current interests include, but are not limited to, intercontinental trade in twelfth-century East Asia, subaltern histories as well as historical narratives in the premodern Japanese context.

 

Anne Commons (Ph.D., Columbia, 2003)

Professor Anne Commons is a literary historian with a particular interest in issues of canon formation and cultural memory in medieval Japanese poetry and poetic discourse, and in premodern Japanese culture in general. Her publications include Hitomaro: Poet as God, and her current research focus is early medieval Japanese poetic commentaries and their role as repositories and shapers of poetic and cultural knowledge.

 

David Quinter (Ph.D., Stanford, 2006)

Professor David Quinter, who has a joint appointment with Religious Studies, is a scholar of East Asian religions. His area of specialization is medieval Japanese Buddhism. In broad terms, his research examines the interweaving of narratives, rituals, and images in devotional cults and the life portraits of individual saints. Particular interests center on the Shingon Ritsu movement founded by Eison (1201-90) and Ninsho (1217-1303); the Manjusri cult in China and Japan; outcasts (hinin), discrimination, and social welfare in premodern Japanese religion; and the pluralistic devotional landscape of medieval Nara. Recent and forthcoming publications include “Creating Bodhisattvas: Eison, Hinin, and the ‘Living Manjusri,’” Monumenta Nipponica 62/4 (2007); “Emulation and Erasure: Eison, Ninsho, and the Gyoki Cult,” Eastern Buddhist, n.s., 39/1 (2008); and “Visualizing the Manjusri Parinirvana Sutra: The Wenshushili banniepan jing as Contemplation Sutra,” Asia Major (2011).

 

 

JAPAN 242, The Samurai in Japanese Culture (Adolphson). An exploration through a variety of media of the rise and fall of Japan’s warrior class, as well as the construction of samurai mythology (both positive and negative) in Japanese popular culture and the Western imagination.

 

JAPAN 432, Japan’s Hidden Histories (Adolphson). Despite recent progress in the field, premodern Japan is still largely understood as a “one-class society,” where centuries of dominance by courtiers were replaced by an equally overwhelming rule by the warrior class in the late twelfth century. This capstone seminar, designed for advanced undergraduate students and graduate students, will challenge these notions by focusing on other classes and categories that have been overlooked as a consequence of this traditionalist approach. Specifically, we will read English language works exploring the worlds of clerics, artisans and traders, as well as of women in all stages of society in an attempt to better grasp premodern Japanese society as a whole.

 

JAPAN 421, Topics in Japanese Literary History (Commons). This capstone course, suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, focuses on the major literary works (in English translation) of a particular period in premodern Japanese history. Works from a wide variety of genres are examined in their historical, cultural and social contexts to give students a new and fuller understanding of them. The focus changes from year to year: recent courses have concentrated on works from medieval Japan, including war tales and noh theatre, and on the Tale of Genji.

 

JAPAN 460, Topics in Japanese Studies: Revisioning Japanese Religions (Quinter). This course, offered as an advanced seminar for undergraduate and graduate students, explores changing visions of Japanese religion, with a focus on the premodern period. After a brief overview of religion in Japan, we will investigate varying models of ancient and medieval Buddhism, paying particular attention to Buddhism in the Kamakura period (1185-1333) and “original enlightenment” thought and practice. We then examine recent studies of women and gender and the changing relationship between Buddhism and Shinto in medieval and early modern Japan. The course closes with a revisionist look at Zen in the modern period.

JAPAN 598, Topics in Premodern Japanese Literature (Commons). A graduate-level seminar on various texts and issues in premodern Japanese literature, tailored to the students’ needs.

 

 

 

Daniel Fried (Ph.D., Harvard, 2003)

Professor Fried, who has a joint appointment with Comparative Literature, specializes in comparisons between the Chinese and European histories of literary criticism. Originally trained as a Tang scholar, his publication record is very broad, stretching from pre-Qin philosophy to contemporary cinema, precisely because he is interested in the continuity of certain dynamics in the history of criticism which cannot be limited by periodization. In particular, he is focused on how criticism is a means of translating social imperatives into aesthetic forms (or, conversely, of hiding those social imperatives from aesthetics!). Currently, he is working on a SSHRC-funded research project on the relevance of Zhuangzi to literary theory in the ‘posttheoretical’ age.

 

 

Zeb Raft (Ph.D., Harvard, 2007)

Professor Raft’s interests encompass two related yet distinct areas: Chinese poetry, and the various ways in which Chinese poetry has been and might be read. For the former, his work to date has focused on poetry from the Han to Tang (roughly 2nd c. BCE to 9th c. CE), particularly on the relationship of poetic practices to the elite culture in which they took shape. His PhD dissertation focused on the role of the pervasive but neglected genre of four-syllable poetry in early medieval literary culture, but his interests extend from the early period (the Book of Songs) into the poetry, in all forms, of more recent eras. For the latter, he is interested not only in how poetry was read in certain historical periods, but in whether historically correct readings in fact provide the “best” ways of reading Chinese poetry. This interest is the motivation behind his most recent project, a study of the translation of Chinese poetry into English, with an accompanying web-based bibliography (http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/chinesepoetry/). Through the study of translations, including those which have been discarded due to their excesses and inaccuracies, he aims to uncover different approaches to Chinese poetry, approaches that will enrich our appreciation of the poetry regardless of whether or not we deem them successful or even acceptable.