Tomi Suzuki

Research Interests: Modern Japanese literature and criticism in comparative context; literary and cultural theory, particularly theory of narrative, genre and gender, modernism and modernity; intellectual history of modern Japan; history of reading, canon formation, and literary historiesProfessor Suzuki is completing a book entitled Gender, Literary Culture, and Nation in Japan: 1880s-1950s, which investigates the formation of the literary field from the late nineteenth century to the postwar period in relationship to gender construction, language reform, and education. It explores the modernist construction and questioning of Japanese linguistic and cultural traditions in a transnational context. Most recently, she coedited The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

She teaches courses in modern Japanese literature and criticism; gender and writing; and Asian humanities (major texts of East Asia and modern East Asian texts). Her major publications include Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford University Press, 1996); Katarareta jiko: Nihon kindai no shishosetsu gensetsu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2000); Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (author and coeditor, Stanford University Press, 2001); Sozo sareta koten (author and coeditor, Shin’yosha, 1999); Censorship, Media, and Literary Culture in Japan (Bilingual Edition, author and co-editor, Shin’yōsha, 2012). Her recent articles include “Translations and Modern Japanese Literature: Re-reading Mori Ogai’s Maihime at Columbia University,” Bungaku, vol.15, no.5 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, September, 2014); “Transformations and Continuities: Censorship and Occupation-Period Criticism,” in Occupation-period Literary Journals: 1946–1947, vol. 2 (Senryoki zasshi shiryo taikei: bungakuhen, Iwanami Shoten, 2010); “Theatrical and Cinematic Imagination and Masochistic Aesthetics: Allure of Gender-Crossing in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s Early Works,” in Tanizaki Junichiro, ou l’ecriture par-dela les frontiers (Tanizaki Junichiro: kyokai o koete, Kasama Shoin, 2009); “The Tale of Genji, National Literature, Language, and Modernism,” in Envisioning ‘The Tale of Genji’: Media, Gender, and Cultural Production (Columbia University Press, 2008).

Professor Suzuki received her BA (1974) and MA (1977) from the University of Tokyo and her PhD from Yale (1988). She joined Columbia’s faculty in 1996.