Jeffrey Niedermaier is the Mulberry Essence Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. A scholar of the literature and poetry of premodern Japan, he works on texts composed in the classical Japanese language as well as in literary Chinese. His primary research investigates how Japanese vernacular “songs” (waka) and Chinese-inscribed “belles-lettres” (kanshibun) were leveraged in order to situate the local within a pluricentric, trans-Asian ecumene of Chinese-writing communities known as the “Sinographic Sphere.” He is curious about how hybrid texts and multiscriptal literacies contribute to the imagination of the wider world and its variegated abroads. His research has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays grant and has appeared in The Journal of World Literature.
He holds an AB in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Japanese literature from Yale University.
Paper title: The Study of Elsewhere, “Elsewhere Studies,” and the Global Humanities (Panel 2, 2A)