Fall 2013 Office Hours: N/A

Since the publication of his co-authored book in Japanese, Gei Sutadiizu [Gay Studies] (Seidosha, 1997) J. Keith Vincent has worked to facilitate dialogue on literature, translation, queer theory, and feminist studies between the U.S. and Japan. His book, Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction (Harvard Asia Center, Fall 2012) reads first-person fictional narratives in which male protagonists are haunted by past love affairs with other men as indications that Japan’s newly heteronormative culture was unable and perhaps unwilling to expunge completely the memory of a male homosocial past now deemed “perverse.”  Recent edited volumes include Honoring Eve, a Spring 2010 issue of Criticism co-edited with Erin Murphy, on the work of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture, (Routledge, 2010) co-edited with Nina Cornyetz. His translation of Okamoto Kanoko’s A Riot of Goldfish (Hesperus 2010) won the 2011 U.S. Japan Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, and his translation of Hamao Shirō’s The Devil’s Disciple, a classic of prewar “erotic grotesque” detective fiction, was also published by Hesperus Press in 2011. He was part of the team that translated Natsume Sōseki’s 1905 work, Theory of Literature (Columbia UP 2009), which won the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature in 2011. Vincent was the chief translator for The Japanese Woman (Tokyo Women’s University Institute for Women’s Studies, 2010), a collection of classic essays by Japanese feminists from the early 20th century.  In the field of contemporary Japanese media theory, he co-translated, together with Dawn Lawson, the Lacanian critic Saitō Tamaki’s groundbreaking study of Japanese anime and “otaku” culture, Beautiful Fighting Girl (Minnesota UP, 2011).   He is currently at work on a book on the genre of literary sketching (shaseibun) in the early twentieth century, tentatively titled Haiku in Prose: Shaseibun and the Abortive Beginnings of Japanese Realism. In a forthcoming article for the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Approaches to Literature, he explores the relationship between queer theory and cognitive narratology. For the 2013-2014 academic year he will occupy the Toyota Visiting Professorship in Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Curriculum Vitae