J. Keith Vincent
Associate Professor of Japanese & Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Title Associate Professor of Japanese & Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Office STH 606
- Email kvincent@bu.edu
- Phone 617-358-6669
- Education BA, University of Kansas
MA, Columbia University
PhD, Columbia University
J. Keith Vincent is a translator and scholar of Japanese literature. He has just completed two new translation of stories by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and is working on a retranslation of Natsume Sōseki’s novel Michikusa.
His translation of Okamoto Kanoko’s A Riot of Goldfish (Hesperus Press, 2010) won the 2011 U.S. Japan Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, and his translation of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s novella Devils in Daylight was shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize in 2018. He has translated classic essays by Japanese feminists into English and co-edited one of the first anthologies of US queer theory into Japanese.
He is currently completing a biography of the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) told through translations of dozens of Shiki’s haiku with close readings of the poems in the context of Shiki’s life and work. Other current projects include a genjipoems.org, a collaborative database created with his students of five very different English translations of all 795 poems appearing in the thousand-year-old novel The Tale of Genji. See recent prese on the site here.
Professor Vincent taught the BU Translation Seminar in 2011 and again in 2024. He co-taught TL540 with Professor Sassan Tabatabai, and he has taught several iterations of TL551 Topics in Translation: Lives of Translators, in which students read translators’ memoirs, biographies, and novels about translators to ask why and how it matters who translates. This fall (2025), he is teaching TL500 History & Theory of Translation.
Personal website: jkeithvincent.com