Academic interests
My research is in Comparative Studies, with a specific focus on Japan's creative appropriation of Euro-American culture, and the challenges it poses to current views of globalization, multiculturalism, and transnationalism.
My first monograph, The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan and the United States (2008), was the first scholarly work to approach the texts of this renowned contemporary author from a cross-cultural perspective, providing an explanation of his reception on both sides of the Pacific.
My second monograph, Holy Ghosts: The Christian Century in Modern Japanese Fiction (2015), investigated modern Japanese fictional representations of the Christian century (1543-1638), to challenge the conventional understanding of Japan's cross-cultural negotiations and propose an innovative vision of Japanese social and political formations.
Rewriting History in Manga: Stories for the Nation (2016), a collective volume co-edited with Prof. Nissim Otmazgin, looked at the representation and "rewriting" of history in the medium of manga, Japanese comics.
My next co-edited volume, Women's Manga in Asia and Beyond (2019) elucidates social and historical aspects of the Asian wave of manga from ever-broader perspectives of transnationalization and glocalization. With a specific focus on women's direct roles in manga creation, it illustrates how the globalization of manga has united different cultures and identities, focusing on networks of women creators and readerships.
My third monograph, Two-World Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro's Early Novels (Hawaii UP 2020) explored the Nobel-Prize winning author's double cultural positioning and its use to challenge the conventional understanding of World Literature.
My most recent project examines the representation of Southern and Northern European countries in modern and contemporary Japanese literature and popular culture, focusing on how they are portrayed and perceived as simultaneously charmingly exotic and reassuringly familiar places. I examine the way in which this image of Scandinavian and Mediterranean cultures, which I describe as a “Near West,” challenges the conventional understanding of Western modernity as coinciding with the Western European (specifically French and German) and Anglo-American cultural spheres, historically evolving from the formation of European nation-states and their colonial expansion. By looking at how Japanese cultural stereotypes about the foreign are constructed and reproduced through a constant process of mirroring and differentiation, my broader goal is to challenge conventional interpretations of cultural identity and difference and provide a more nuanced understanding of their complex intersection in the contemporary world .
Courses taught
JAP2300 introduction to modern Japanese literature
JAP4320 modern Japan through novels
JAP3000 Bachelor thesis
KOS4560 Traumatic memory and national identity across the Middle East and East Asia
Background
My training is in Japanese Studies and Comparative Literature. I received my Ph.D. from Università degli Studi di Napoli "l'Orientale" in Italy in 2004. Within my doctoral candidature I was also a research student at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in Japan. I was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies in 2005, and I taught Japanese literature at Harvard University and Brown University in the United States in 2006 and 2007. From 2008 to 2022 I taught and researched Japanese studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. I joined IKOS in 2023.