Associate Professor of Japanese & Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Convener of Japanese Language
Fall 2024 Office Hours: Tuesdays 3-4 and Wednesdays 11-12
J. Keith Vincent is interested in literary friendships: how writers translate their relationships with other writers into aesthetic forms. In his research and teaching, he explores how genders inform genres, how sexuality shapes storytelling, and how great novels and poems emerge. He has a longstanding interest in the way the aesthetics of haiku has informed the modern Japanese novel via the literary friendship between the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki and the novelist Natsume Sōseki.
He is the author of Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction (Harvard Asia Center, 2012) and co-editor of two volumes on Sōseki: Reading Sōseki Now, a special issue of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society, and Sōseki no ibasho, an edited volume in Japanese. 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. Recent articles include “Tragic Fates and the Balm of Beauty: Reading the Tale of Genji in Boston” Shisō, 2024:3; “Purple and White: Sōseki and Shiki’s Homosocial Genji” in the Norton Critical Edition of Dennis Washburn’s translation of The Tale of Genji (2021); “Takemura Kazuko: On Friendship and The Queering of American and Japanese Studies” in Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (2017); and “Queer Reading and Japanese Literature,” in the Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature (2016).
He is currently completing a book manuscript titled “I, Who Go”: The Young Shiki and the Invention of Haiku.
Watch a lecture here by Professor Vincent on Masaoka Shiki and Marcel Proust delivered at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2023.
Here is a lecture delivered in Japanese at Otsuma Women’s University in Tokyo in the fall of 2023, on the impact on Shiki of the suicide of his younger cousin, the poet and playwright Fujino Kohaku.
Personal website: jkeithvincent.com