Institute Project Director
William C. Hedberg is an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and the Associate Director of the Asia Center at ASU. He is the author of The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: 'The Water Margin' and the Making of a National Canon, and his interests include the theory and practice of literary translation, the Japanese reception of Chinese fiction and drama, and travel literature in early modern East Asia. Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, he enjoys baking bread, playing classical guitar, and debating the respective merits of New Mexican and Arizonan cuisine in his free time.
Institute Project Co-Director
Rob Tuck is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature and Culture at ASU. His research interests include Sino-Japanese literary, cultural, and textual contacts. His first book, Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in 19th Century Japan, explored the role of poetic genres and media in shaping national consciousness in Meiji-era Japan. He has also published extensively on Sinitic poetry and writing practices, with pieces in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Sino-Japanese Studies, and Monumenta Nipponica. His current project is a translation of Rai San’yō’s epic kanbun history of Japan, Nihon gaishi 日本外史 (‘An Unofficial History of Japan,’ c. 1827). Currently under contract with Oxford University Press’ Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature, this translation is expected to appear in four volumes from 2027 onwards under the title Nihon gaishi: An Unofficial History of Japan.
Guest Speakers
Lucas Klein is a father, writer, translator, and associate professor of Chinese at Arizona State University. He is associate editor of the Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature (Oxford), author of The Organization of Distance (Brill, 2018), co-editor of Chinese Poetry and Translation (Amsterdam, 2019) and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation (2023), and translator of Mang Ke (Zephyr, 2018), Li Shangyin (NYRB, 2018), Duo Duo (Yale, 2021), Xi Chuan (New Directions, 2012, 2022), and Yu Xuanji (Oxford, forthcoming).
Young Kyun Oh is Associate Professor of Chinese and Sino-Korean at Arizona State University. He works on the cultural connection among East Asian societies with particular foci on language and the book and has published on the linguistic histories of Chinese and Korean, Sinitic literacy, and the culture of books of East Asia. He is the author of Engraving Virtue: The Print History of a Premodern Korean Moral Primer (Brill, 2013) and “Books for the Illiterate" (2022), and recently finished translating a literary Chinese work (Folk Vernacular) by a 19th-century Korean writer, Yi Ok.
Xiaoqiao Ling is Associate Professor of Chinese at Arizona State University. Her main field of interest is late imperial Chinese literature with a focus on performance texts, vernacular fiction, and print culture. She has published in both Chinese and English on fiction and drama commentary, legal imagination in literature, memory and trauma, and Sino-Korean reading practices. She is author of Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2019) and editor of Minor Discourses: Aesthetics of the Everyday (National Taiwan University Press, forthcoming).
Graduate Student Assistant
Antonella Morgillo is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Culture and Language at ASU, specializing in Japanese Studies. She is currently working on Ainu ethnographic film and visual culture. Her research interests include film theory and criticism, visual anthropology, and Japanese ethnographic and documentary film.
Image credit: The 47 Ronin find Moronao in hiding. Utagawa Kunikiyo, Chūshingura jūichi-danme, 1857.