Dennis Charles Washburn
Burlington Northern Foundation Professor in Asian Studies
Hinman Box 6191 303 Anonymous Hall
Dartmouth College
Hanover, N.H. 03755(603) 646-1287
dennis.washburn@dartmouth.edu
Education:••••

Yale University: Ph.D. Japanese Literature (June, 1991)
Waseda University: non-degree research student (October, 1983 to March, 1985)
Pembroke College, Oxford University: MA English Literature (August, 1979)
Harvard University: BA English and American Literature (June, 1976)

Employment:
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Dartmouth College: Assistant Professor (1992-1997); promoted to Associate
Professor with tenure in 1997; appointed to Dartmouth Professorship in JapaneseStudies (research chair), 2001; promoted to Professor in 2006; appointed to theBernstein Professorship in Asian Studies, 2011-18; Burlington Northern
Foundation Professor in Asian Studies in Honor of Richard M. Bressler ’52, 2018
to present
Middlebury College, Japanese School (Summer term): Director (2001~2004);
Director-designate (2000); Head Instructor, Advanced Level (1991, ‘92, ‘94, ‘96)
Harvard University: Assistant Professor (1991-92)
Connecticut College: Instructor (1987-1990); Assistant Professor of Japanese(1990-91)
Yale University: Visiting Instructor (1989-90)

Awards:•••••Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for Translation, Donald Keene Center
for Japanese Studies, Columbia University, 2008 (for Mizukami Tsutomu’s
novellas The Temple of the Wild Geese and Bamboo Dolls of Echizen)
John M. Manley Huntington Award for Newly Promoted Faculty, May 2006,
Dartmouth College
Japan Foreign Minister’s Citation, May 2004 for promotion of cross-cultural
understanding
Jerome Goldstein Award for Distinguished Teaching, Dartmouth College, June
2003
Kenneth Huntington Award for Excellence in Teaching, Dartmouth College, 1997

Dennis Charles Washburn2

Grants and Fellowships:
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Visiting Fellow, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University, Tokyo: April 8 toJuly 25, 2015
Leslie Center for the Humanities grant for a colloquium titled “What is a Classic:
Translation, Reception and the Making of Canons” held on September 26 & 27,
2014 (grant received in November 2013)
Humanities Institute, Dartmouth College, Summer 2013: Fellow in institute on“Toward a Global Sexual Science”
Dartmouth Conference Award, Japan Foundation Grant, Association for AsianStudies (NEAC) Conference Grant for “The Affect of Difference: Asian
Representations of Race under Empire”: awarded 2011-12 for symposium held in
April 2013
Senior Faculty Fellowship, Dartmouth College, Fall 2007
Jacobus Family Fellowship, July 2006
Tuttle Language Grant 2004 Award (with Ikuko Watanabe) for developing
advanced language course materials in Japanese
Co-director of Humanities Institute: "Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology,
and Translations of Modernity" held at Dartmouth during the Fall 2002
Japan Foundation Conference Grant, awarded in conjunction with the Humanities
Institute "Converting Cultures" in April 2002 for conference in December 2002
Humanities Institute, Dartmouth College, Fall 2000: Fellow in institute on “La
Frontera: Los Angeles/Mexico City” (presented paper on the construction ofurban borders in the modernization of Edo/Tokyo)
Senior Faculty Fellowship, Dartmouth College, Fall 1998
Conference grants from the Japan Foundation, the Toshiba Foundation, and the
Dickey Center for International Relations awarded in 1996 to support “Wording
the Image: A Symposium on Japanese Film and Narrative,” September 1997
Humanities Institute, Dartmouth College, Fall 1994: Fellow in institute on "Moral
Knowledge"
Hewlett Faculty Fellowship, Connecticut College, Spring Term, 1991
Monbushō (Japanese Ministry of Education) Fellowship, Waseda University,
1983-1985

Publications:
Monographs:
Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity, New York:
Columbia University Press, 2006.
The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction, New Haven: Yale University Press,
1995.

Dennis Charles Washburn3

Edited volumes:
Editor, contributor, and translator, Norton Critical Edition: The Tale of Genji, New York:W. W. Norton & Co., February, 2021.
Editor, with Christopher Hanscom, The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in
East Asian Empire, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016.
Editor, with Alan Tansman and Jordan Sand, Working Words: New Approaches toJapanese Studies, Berkeley: University of California, eScholarship (peer-reviewed),
http://escholarship.org/uc/search?entity=cjs_pubs, 2012. Published with additional
articles as a special edition of Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Tokyo:
Josai University, vol. 25 (December 2013).
Editor, with A. Kevin Reinhart, Converting Cultures: Ideology, Religion, andTransformations of Modernity, Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Editor, with Carole Cavanaugh, Word and Image in Japanese Cinema, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Editor, with Alan Tansman, Studies in Modern Japanese Literature, Ann Arbor: Center
for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1997.
Translations:(Novels)
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2015. An
abridged version of the translation with a new introduction was published 2021.
Laughing Wolf (Warai ookami), a novel by Tsushima Yūko, Ann Arbor: Center forJapanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2011.
Temple of the Wild Geese (Gan no tera) and Bamboo Dolls of Echizen (Echizen
takeningyō), two novellas by Mizukami Tsutomu, Dalkey Archive Press, 2008.
A Wife in Musashino (Musashino fujin), by Ōoka Shōhei, Ann Arbor: Center for JapaneseStudies, University of Michigan, December 2004.
Shanghai, by Yokomitsu Riichi, Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University ofMichigan, 2001.
The Shade of Blossoms (Kaei), by Ōoka Shōhei, Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies,
University of Michigan, 1998.
(articles, short stories, excerpts)

Dennis Charles Washburn4“おたく/Otaku/Geek,” an essay by Morikawa Kaiichirō, in Working Words: New
Approaches to Japanese Studies, http://escholarship.org/uc/search?entity=cjs_pubs.
Reprinted in Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Tokyo: Josai University, vol.
25 (December 2013), pp. 56-66.
“Being and Doing” by Maruyama Masao, in Review of Japanese Culture and Society,
Tokyo: Josai University, vol. 25 (December 2013), pp. 152-169.
“Scenes of the Mind” by Kajii Motojirō and “Configuration” by Tamura Taijirō, in Three
Dimensional Reading: Re-Imagining Time and Space in Modernist JapaneseFiction (1910s-1930s), ed. Angela Yiu, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press.
2013, pp. 50-61 and pp. 85-100.
Selections from The Tale of Genji, in The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Third
Edition, volume B, eds. Martin Puchner, Wiebke Denecke, New York: W. W.
Norton Co., 2012, pp. 1383-1493.
Conference Volume:
Reading Material: The Production of Narratives, Genres and Literary Identities,
Proceedings of the Association of Japanese Literary Studies, Vol. 7, 2006. Coeditor with James Dorsey.
Articles: (items marked with an * were not peer-reviewed)“Tsushima Yūko’s Laughing Wolf as Confabulatory History,” in Multiple Voices inHeisei Literature, ed. Angela Yiu, Tokyo: Sophia University Press (forthcoming).
*“Foreword,” The Gossamer Years, trans. Edward Seidensticker, Tokyo: Tuttle
Publishing, 2022.
“Romancing the Dead: The Gothic Mode in The Tale of Genji,” in Norton Critical
Edition: The Tale of Genji, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2021, pp. 1333-1350.
“Kawabata Yasunari: Modernism, Memory, and Desire,” in A Companion to World
Literature, ed. Ken Seigneurie, John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., 2019 (online
publication, 4,800 words).
最初のポストモダニスト？三島由紀男における崇高の美学 (The First Postmodernist?
Mishima Yukio’s Aesthetics of the Sublime), in 混沌と抗戦：三島由紀夫と日本、そして世界 (Chaos and Resistance: Mishima Yukio, Japan, and the World), ed. Inoue

Takashi, Kubota Yūko, Tajiri Yoshiki et alia, Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2016, pp. 137-145.
“Another's Speech in Another's Language: Translation as Possession,” Translation
Review, 94:1 (2016), pp. 18-27.

Dennis Charles Washburn5“Introduction” in The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian
Empire, co-authored with Christopher P. Hanscom, Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press, 2016, pp. 1-18.
深淵に置かれテ：『黄梁一炊図』と先生の手紙 (Placed in Abyss: Sensei’s Letter and “A
Bowl of Millet Gruel), in 世界から読む漱石『こころ』(Reading Sōseki’s Kokoro

from a Global View), ed. Angela Yiu, Sachio Kobayashi, and Naoshige Nagao,
Tokyo: Bensei Publications, 2016, pp. 66-77.
“Translated Fiction, Political Fiction” in The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature,ed. Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, with David Lurie, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2016, pp. 578-582.
“Is Abjection a Virtue? Silence and the Trauma of Apostasy,” in Approaching Silence:
New Perspectives on Shusaku Endo’s Classic Novel, ed. Mark W. Dennis andDarren J. N. Middleton, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 205-221.
“The Transfiguration of Loss: Grief and aging in the Maboroshi (Spirit summoner)
chapter of The Tale of Genji,” in The Poetics of Aging: Resisting and Transcending
Mortality in the Japanese Narrative Arts, Proceedings of the Association ofJapanese Literary Studies, vol. 13, 2012 pp. 7-28.
“Introduction” and “文学/Bungaku/Literature” in Working Words: New Approaches toJapanese Studies, Berkeley: University of California, eScholarship,
http://escholarship.org/uc/search?entity=cjs_pubs, 2012. Reprinted in Review ofJapanese Culture and Society, Tokyo: Josai University, vol. 25 (December 2013),
pp. 1-8 and pp. 116-126.
*“Foreword,” The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon (reprint of the Arthur Waley translation),
Tokyo: Tuttle, 2011, pp. 5-19.
“To Make Gods and Demons Weep: Witnessing the Sublime in Death in Midsummer andPatriotism, in Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding toTrauma in Postwar Literature and Film, ed. David Stahl and Mark Williams,
Leiden: Brill, May 2010, pp. 75-103.
*“Foreword,” The Tale of Genji (reprint of the Arthur Waley translation), Tokyo: Tuttle,
2010, pp. ix-xvii.
“Mastering Narrative: Imagined History, Fading Memory in Final Fantasy X,”
MECHADEMIA 4: War/Time, Frenchy Lunning, ed., November 2009, pp. 149-162.
“Performance Anxieties, or Hitting on Theory,” Proceedings of the Association forJapanese Literary Studies Vol. 9 (Summer 2008), pp. 190-197.
“The Poetics of Conversion and the Problem of Translation in Endō Shūsaku’s Silence,”in Converting Cultures: Ideology, Religion, and Transformations of Modernity,
Leiden: Brill, 2007 pp. 345-363.

Dennis Charles Washburn6“Ōe Kenzaburō” in Modern Japanese Writers, ed. Jay Rubin, New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 2001, pp. 277-294.
“Mishima Yukio” in Modern Japanese Writers, ed. Jay Rubin, New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 2001, pp. 213-226.
“Futabatei Shimei” in Modern Japanese Writers, ed. Jay Rubin, New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 2001, pp. 107-120.
“A Story of Cruel Youth: Kon Ichikawa’s Enjō and the Art of Adapting in 1950s Japan,”in Kon Ichikawa, ed. James Quandt, Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario, 2001, pp.
151-169.
“The Arrest of Time: Sacred Transgressions of Vengeance Is Mine,” in Word and Imagein Japanese Cinema, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 318-341.
"Toward A View from Nowhere: Perspective and Ethical Judgment in Fires on the
Plain," Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 21: No. 1 (Winter, 1997), pp. 105-131.
"Structures of Emptiness: Kitsch, Nihilism and the Inauthentic in Mishima's Aesthetics,"
in Studies in Modern Japanese Literature, Ann Arbor, Center for Japanese Studies,
University of Michigan, 1997, pp. 283-306.
"Manly Virtue and the Quest for Self: The Bildungsroman of Mori Ōgai," Journal ofJapanese Studies, Vol. 21: No. 1 (Winter, 1995), pp. 1-32.
"The Homeless Scholar: Asakawa Kan'ichi and the Problem of Modern Identity,"
Asakawa Kan'ichi no sekai (The world of Asakawa Kan'ichi), ed. Asakawa Kan'ichikenkyūkai, Tokyo: Waseda University Press, 1993, pp. 1-12.
"Ghostwriters and Literary Haunts: The Subordination of Ethics to Art in Ugetsu
monogatari," Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 45. No. 1. (Spring, 1990), pp. 39-74.
"Miyazawa Kenji no romanshugi" (Miyazawa Kenji’s Romanticism), in Kenji sōmei:Essays on Miyazawa Kenji, ed. James Morita, Tokyo: Yūseidō, 1988, pp. 225-35.
Reviews:
Circles of Fantasy by C. Andrew Gerstle and The Marginal World of Ōe Kenzaburō by
Michiko Wilson, Asian Thought and Society, Vol. XII: No. 34 (March, 1987), pp.
90-92.
Off Center by Masao Miyoshi, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 54: No. 1 (July,1994), pp. 280-312.
Writing Ground Zero by John Whittier Treat, Journal of Japanese Studies Vol. 22: No. 1(Winter 1996), pp. 188-194.

Dennis Charles Washburn

7

Rituals of Self-Revelation by Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, The Journal of Asian Studies,Vol. 56: No. 2 (May 1997).
“Performing Theory” (a review article on Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative
Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction by Atsuko Sakaki), Monumenta
Nipponica, Vol. 55: No. 2 (Summer 2000), pp. 271-81.
A Tanizaki Feast: The International Symposium in Venice, ed. Adriana Boscara andAnthony Hood Chambers, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 59: No. 3 (Fall 2000), pp.
736-37.
Soundings in Time: The Fictive Art of Yasunari Kawabata by Roy Starrs, Journal ofJapanese Studies Vol.27: No. 2 (Summer 2001), pp. 441-46.
“Modern Mikado,” Review of Emperor of Japan by Donald Keene, New York Times
Book Review, (August 18, 2002), p. 9.
Topographies of Japanese Modernism by Seiji Lippit, Journal of Japanese Studies
Vol.29: No. 2 (Summer 2003), pp. 372-76.
Ozu's Anti-Cinema by Yoshida Kiju, The Journal of Japanese Studies Vol. 31: No. 2(Summer 2005). pp. 458-62.
Writing Home: Representations of the Native Place in Modern Japanese Literature by
Stephen Dodd, Monumenta Nipponica, Vol.60: No. 2, (Summer 2005), pp. 278-81.
Gender and National Literature: Heian Texts in the Constructions of Japanese Modernity
by Tomiko Yoda, Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 66: No. 4, (December 2005),
pp. 545-48.
Rhetoric in Modern Japan: Western Influences on the Development of Narrative andOratorical Style by Massimiliano Tomasi, The Journal of Japanese Studies Vol.
32: No. 1, (Winter 2006), pp. 202-06.
Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature: A Critical Approach, Rachael
Hutchinson and Mark Williams, eds., Japan Forum (July 2008).
Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History by Scott Nygren, The
Journal of Japanese Studies Vol. 34: No. 2, (Summer 2008), pp. 463-67.
A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan, by Aaron Gerow, The
Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2, (Summer 2010), pp. 368-372.
The Alien Within: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese
Literature, by Leith Morton, Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 66, No. 2 (2011), pp.
366-368.

Dennis Charles Washburn

8

The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature, by Michael
Emmerich, Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 70, No. 1 (2015), pp. 163-169.
Encyclopedia Articles:“Natsume Sōseki” in Encyclopedia of the Novel, ed. Paul Schellinger, Vol. 2, Chicago,
Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998.
“Toshio Mori” in The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short
Story, ed. Blanche Gelfant, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 390394.
Ongoing Projects:
With the support of Dartmouth’s Neukom Institute and the US-Japan Friendship
Commission I have begun preliminary work on setting up Genji Lab, acustomizable digital workspace for scholarly textual and visual analysis ofMurasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. This digital resource will, when fully
implemented, allow for comparison of multiple combinations of text,
commentaries, translations, and visual art forms of the narrative produced over the
past millennium. This is a collaborative project that will involve colleagues andinstitutions in the United States, Japan, and Europe.
I’ve begun preparing a monograph with the working title “Sublime Aesthetics in The
Tale of Genji: A Reader’s Memoir”. This project is a direct extension of the work I
undertook to prepare the Norton Critical Edition of The Tale of Genji. My plan is tomap out representations of the sublime through several different discourses that
operate within the narrative: the literary/artistic, the environmental/natural, thepolitical, the gothic/supernatural, and the religious. I will frame this mapping in two
ways: by comparing the sublime aesthetics of The Tale of Genji with relevant works
that span different time periods, cultures, and media; and by examining my own
propensities as a reader and translator to explain why I see the sublime as usefully
applicable in this case. My goal is to produce a work that is a hybrid: a criticalanalysis and a memoir of my reading of the text.
Courses:
COLT 1: Read the WorldCOLT 7: Reading The Tale of Genji (first-year seminar)
COLT 35: The Novel: Desire, Memory, and Narrative Time
COLT 64: Writing at the Extreme: Jewish and Japanese Responses to Crisis andCatastrophe
COLT 67: The Karma of Love: Japanese Women Writers and the Classical Canon
COLT 72: Global Literary and Cultural Theory
COLT 85: Senior Seminar
COLT 103: Workshop in Critical Writing (graduate seminar)Dennis Charles Washburn

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COLT 105: Graduate Seminar
FILM 41: Global Gothic: The Aesthetics of Horror in Japanese and Western Cinema
FILM 42: Flickering Phantoms: Imagined Identities in Japanese Film and Animation
FILM 47: Krieger’s Virtual Girlfriend: Japanese Animation and the Post-human
AMES 43.3: Tokyo and Shanghai as Ideas: Urban Space/Imagined Modernity
AMES 43.6: China in the Japanese Imagination: Translated Identities
Humanities 1: Dialogues with the Classics
Humanities 2: The Modern Labyrinth
Japanese 10: Introduction to Japanese Culture
Japanese 61: Transgression and Canonization in Modern Japanese Fiction and Film
In addition to these recent courses, I have taught modern Japanese language at all levels
as well as courses on classical Japanese. I have developed a variety of survey courses
using English-language translations that cover the entire range of Japanese literary forms
from the Nara period to the present day, and I have co-taught courses on comparative
ethics, Russian and Japanese imperial cultures, and the postwar global cinema. I havesupervised numerous independent studies and senior thesis projects.
Service:
Acting Chair, Program in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies (Summer 2021 toSpring 2022)
Frank J. Guarini Associate Dean for International Studies and Interdisciplinary Programs(Summer 2017 to Spring 2021)
Chair, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies program (Winter 2016 to Spring 2017)
Chair, Librarian Search Committee (Winter and Spring, 2016)
House Professor (Summer 2015 to Spring 2019 )Chair, Comparative Literature Program (Summer 2014 to Fall 2015)
Chair, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures, 2000-2007
Director, Japanese School at Middlebury College, 2000-2004
Director of Dartmouth’s foreign studies programs in Kanazawa and Tokyo
Graduate Director, Program in Comparative Literature, 2002-03 and 2013-14.
I have served on the following College committees:
the Committee on Priorities;
the Committee Advisory to the President;
the Committee on Senior Fellowships;

Dennis Charles Washburn10

the ad hoc Committee on Intellectual Life;
the Committee on Off-Campus Activities (served as chair);
the Committee on Student Life (served as chair, 2010-11);
the steering committees of the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies program, theComparative Literature program, and the Women and Gender Studies program.
In addition to the above standing committees, I have served on numerous tenure andpromotion committees in AMELL, Film Studies, and Religion and have been a memberof the faculty advisory committees for the Ethics Institute, the Dickey Center, and the
Humanities Center. I have also served on ad hoc committees reviewing the Office of OffCampus programs, the Rassias Foundation, the Hopkins Center, Film and Media Studies,and African and African-American Studies.
I have been a member of the jury for the US-Japan Friendship Commission Translation
Prize since 2011. In 2017-18 I served on the PEN Translation Prize Committee.
I have acted as referee for numerous articles and book-length manuscripts, as an outside
evaluator for programs at Smith, Amherst, Haverford, Dickinson, Middlebury,
Georgetown, Pomona, Brown, Harvard, Berkeley, and as an external reviewer for morethan thirty tenure and promotion cases.
Membership in Professional Organizations:Board of Trustees, New Hampshire Humanities Council (2003-2008)
Association of Asian Studies, member of Council of Conferences, elected to term from2007-2009
Association of Teachers of Japanese: served on governing board, 2002-03
Modern Language Association: member of Executive Committee for East Asian Division(post 1900), elected for term from 2006-2011, served as chair 2010; elected to two-year
term on the Nominating Committee (2014-15); member of Executive Committee forJapanese Literature (pre 1900), served as chair 2020.
Advisory Board, Monumenta Nipponica, Sophia University, Tokyo
Editorial Board, New Studies of Modern Japan series, Lexington Books
Activities and Presentations (from 2001):“Culture and Fascism in Interwar Japan,” conference at the University of California,
Berkeley, March 2001 – discussant for the final summary panel“Mishima Symposium” at Columbia University, March 2001 – presented a paper titled“Kitsch and Violence in Mishima’s Rites of Love and Death”

Dennis Charles Washburn

11

Organized and co-hosted the 15th Annual Meeting of The Japanese Language Teachers
Association of New England at Dartmouth College, August 24 and 25, 2001
Organized Modern History Workshop held November 2 to November 4, 2001 at
Dartmouth College
Co-chaired panel titled "Writing/Cinema" at The Face of Another: japanesecinema/global images a conference held at Yale University February 21 to February 24,
2002"Visions of Dominance/Phantoms of Desire: Yokomitsu Riichi's Shanghai," Noon
Lecture Series sponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan,
March 14, 2001
"The Poetics of Conversion and Endō Shūsaku's Silence," lecture sponsored by theInternational Center, The Ohio State University, April 16, 2003
Co-organizer for the New England Conference of the Association for Asian Studies
Annual Meeting, November 5 & 6, 2004, Dartmouth College; chair and discussant panel,“Issues in Meiji and Taishō Japan”
Organizer of the Association of Japanese Literary Studies Annual Meeting on the topic“Reading Material: The Production of Narratives, Genres and Literary Identities,”
October 7~9, 2005, Dartmouth College“Learning to Translate Al-Bhed: Mastering the Narrative of Final Fantasy X,” paper
presented at KinemaClub 7, a symposium on recent trends in film and media, Yale
University, March 24-26, 2006
International Conference on Japanese Language Education, presenter on panel titled“Japanese literature and translation in the 21st century,” Columbia University, August
5~6, 2006
Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting, panelist on round-table, “The translationand publication of contemporary Japanese literature”, Boston, March 24, 2007
Workshop on “National Language and Colonial Modernity in Japan and Korea,”
panel discussant and roundtable moderator, Harvard University, April 27, 2007
“Performance Anxieties, or Hitting on Theory”: paper presented at the 16th Annual
Meeting of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies, Princeton University,
November 2-4, 2007
Organized panel, “Race and Empire in East Asia,” for the MLA conference in Chicago
from December 27~30, 2007: presented paper titled “Eugenics and the discourse of theimperial subject in Shimazaki Tôson’s Hakai”

Dennis Charles Washburn

12“The Art of Translation: a gathering of translators of various languages and literatures inconversation on the art of translation”: invited speaker, University of California,
Berkeley, April 25, 2008
“From Biological Racialism to Cultural Racialism: Some Reflections on the Imperial
Subject in Tôson's Hakai and Yokomitsu's Shanhai”: lecture given at The University ofWashington, Seattle, April 28, 2008
Visiting Agassiz Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures,
University of California, Berkeley, Fall 2008.
Wu Foundation Lecture, “Mishima and the Postwar Sublime”: Yale University, February
2009.
University Seminars on Race, Dartmouth College, November 10 2009, February 22, 2010
and May 21 2010. Co-convener and discussant.
“The Transfiguration of Loss: Grief and aging in the Maboroshi (Spirit summoner)
chapter of The Tale of Genji": presented at the Association of Japanese Literary Studies
Annual Meeting on The Poetics of Aging: Confronting, Resisting and Transcending
Mortality in the Japanese Narrative Arts: Tufts University, November 4-6, 2011
“Imagined History, Fading Memory”: invited lecture, Sophia University, Tokyo,
December 8, 2011
“Translation and Language Pedagogy”: invited lecture, Waseda University, Tokyo,
December 9, 2011.
“The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race under Empire”: a series of workshops
held at Dartmouth College, May 14~16, 2009 and May 21-22, 2010; at UCLA, December
1-2, 2011; and at the MLA conference in Boston, January 5, 2013. Acted as co-convener
and discussant.
“The Affect of Difference: A Symposium on Representations of Race and Identity under
Asian Empires”: organizer and discussant for conference held at Dartmouth College,
April 25 ~ April 28, 2013.
“Un-translating the Classics: Philology, Language Teaching, and Japanese Literary
Texts”: Keynote Address for the American Association of Teachers of Japanese at thenational conference of the Association for Asian Studies, Philadelphia, March 27, 2014.
Presentation for panel titled “Blood on the Scales: The Sins of Translation” at thenational conference of the Association for Asian Studies, Philadelphia, March 27, 2014.
"Another’s Speech in Another’s Language: Translation as Possession in The Tale ofGenji”: talk given at the Japan Forum of the Reischauer Institute at Harvard University,
April 27, 2014.

Dennis Charles Washburn

13“What is a Classic? Translation, Reception and the Making of Canons”: colloquium held
September 26 & 27, 2014 at Dartmouth College: organizer, moderator, and opening
speaker.
“The Art and Craft of Translation”: talk presented on panel held in conjunction with thepremiere of the opera Death With Interruptions, based on the José Saramago novel, at the
Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley, March 18, 2015.
“Translations and Japanese literary studies”: panelist at an international workshop
sponsored by the Comparative Culture Institute, Sophia University, Tokyo, July 18, 2015.
Lecture on translation and The Tale of Genji, Middlebury College, November 3, 2015.
「最初のポストモダニスト？三島由紀夫における崇高の美学」(The First Postmodernist?

Mishima Yukio’s Aesthetics of the Sublime): paper presented at the International
Mishima Symposium at Tokyo University, November 14 & 15, 2015 and Aoyama
Gakuin, November 22, 2015.
Presentation on Yokomitsu Riichi’s novel Shanghai, Graduate Workshop, UC Berkeley,
December 11 & 12, 2015.
“Another's Speech in Another's Language: Translation as Possession”, lecture presented
at Smith College, March 10, 2016.
“The Uji chapters of The Tale of Genji”: seminar conducted at Yale University, April 12,
2016.
Talk and panel discussion on my translation of The Tale of Genji, Bradford Literary
Festival, Bradford, UK, May 28, 2016.
Served on the translation prize committee for PEN, Summer and Fall 2016.
“NecroRomancer: Genji and the Gothic Sublime”: Keynote address for Worlds of The
Tale of Genji Symposium, Boston University, November 5, 2016. The symposium
focused on my translation of the work.
Visualizing Texts, Reading Images: Representations of the Body and Gender inIllustrated Texts of Pre-Meiji Japan. Workshop held April 14 & 15 2017 at Dartmouth(co-organizer with Sachi Hori-Schmidt and moderator).
“Lineage of Japanese Prose Fiction”, panel discussion at the Center for Japanese Studies,
UC Berkeley, November 17, 2017.
Visualizing Texts, Reading Images: Representations of Illnesses, Love, and Travel in
Illustrated Texts of Pre-Meiji Japan. Workshop held April 20 & 21 2018 at Dartmouth(co-organizer with Sachi Hori-Schmidt).
“Utsukushiki shi no monogatari” (Romancing the Dead), talk given at symposium titledDennis Charles Washburn

14“Genji monogatari: dentō to mirai” (The Tale of Genji: traditions and futures) held on
December 14 & 15, 2019 at the Shibuya campus of Jissen Women’s University in Tokyo.
Roundtable: Translation and Multilingualism in Premodern Japanese Literature. Panel
held January 9, 2021 at the Modern Language Association in Washington DC. I served as
co-organizer and moderator (panel was held online due to Covid).
Embodiment: Representations of Corporeality. Workshop held December 3 ~ 5 2021 at
Dartmouth. Discussant. Note: this is a continuation of the Visualizing Texts, Reading
Images series of workshops.
“The Tale of Genji.” The Norton Library and Norton Critical Editions Speakers Series(with Sachi Scmidt-Hori), March 24, 2022.
Plenary Panel: “Translating Form and Aesthetics in Japanese Literature.” I organized andmoderated this panel for the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers Annual
Conference at Yale University, October 20~23, 2022.
Visiting Professor, UC Berkeley, Fall term 2022 (August to December). Organized andtaught graduate/faculty seminar on current research topic, the sublime in Japanese
aesthetics. Presented in a public roundtable on topics related to The Tale of Genji(November 9, 2022).