Professor, Japanese & Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
he/him/his
On leave Fall 2023
J. Keith Vincent’s research focuses on modern Japanese literature, queer theory, translation, and the novel. He is the author of Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction (Harvard Asia Center, 2012). Recent articles include “Sekai ni hirogaru Shiki kenkyū to sono kadai” (“Shiki Studies Goes Global”) in the Shiki kaishi #163, July 2019; “Takemura Kazuko: On Friendship and The Queering of American and Japanese Studies” in Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (2017); “Better than Sex? Masaoka Shiki’s Haiku on Food” in Devouring Japan: Global Perspectives on Japanese Culinary Identity (2017) ; and “Queer Reading and Japanese Literature,” in the Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature (2016). Recent edited volumes include Reading Sōseki Now, a special issue of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society, co-edited with Reiko Abe Auestad and Alan Tansman (2017) and Honoring Eve, a Spring 2010 issue of Criticism co-edited with Erin Murphy, on the work of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. 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. His abridged translation of Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book (2021) is available as an audiobook on Alexander. He is currently working on Shiki: A Life in Haiku, a biography of Masaoka Shiki told through haiku, and a book on haiku and the Japanese novel, with a focus on Shiki and Natsume Sōseki.
Watch a recent lecture by Professor Vincent on Shiki and Marcel Proust here.
Personal website: jkeithvincent.com