July 2022
Began my three-year term as Chair of Comparative Literature at Michigan. Check out this great department!
April 2022
Three reviews of Figures of the World are out: Jonathan Abel in MLQ, Stuart Burrows in Novel, and Patti Luedecke in Studies in American Naturalism
I’ve agreed to Chair the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan starting in July
November 2021
Spoke about Figures of the World in Michael Bourdaghs’s graduate seminar The Worlds of Japanese Literature at the University of Chicago. Thanks for the invitation, Michael!
Gave a book talk on Figures of the World for the Modern East Asian Literature Research Cluster at the University of Hong Kong. Daniel Poch was the discussant. Thanks, Daniel!
July 2021
“American Naturalism’s Worldly History,” drawn from Figures of the World, published in a special issue of New Centennial Review on “American Literary Naturalism in the World”
March 2021
Published my review of Justin Jesty’s Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan in Modern Language Quarterly. Great book!
December 2020
Published “Misreading Provincializing Europe“ in Práticas da História’s special issue marking the twentieth anniversary of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book.
July 2020
Figures of the World, my book on the naturalist novel, is out from Northwestern University Press. Order it from Northwestern or read the open-access PDF or Adobe Epub edition. Thanks to everyone who supported this project over the years.
February 2020
Gave a talk on Ôe Kenzaburô and the Afro-Asian Writers Association, “Ôe, Africa, and Mr. Delchef: Non-Aligning Japan,” at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia. Kim Brandt was the great discussant for this section of my work on Japanese Writers in the “Bandung Moment”.
Spoke on “Tokyo in Tashkent: The Afro-Asian Writers Conference and the Problem of Colonial Responsibility” at the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies at UCLA, from my research for Japanese Writers in the “Bandung Moment”. Thanks to Bill Marotti for the invitation.
January 2020
Spoke at the University of Chicago’s Center for East Asian Studies on “Ōe Kenzaburô’s Non-Alignment: Political Solidarity in the Bandung Era,” based on research on Ôe for Japanese Writers in the “Bandung Moment”. Thanks to Olga Solovieva for the invitation.
December 2019
Presented my work on the Conference of Afro-Asian Writers to Columbia’s University Seminar on Modern Japan. My thanks to Yukiko Koga for serving as discussant.
October 2019
Gave a talk on Japanese writers’ participation in the 1958 Conference of Afro-Asian Writers, part of my research for Japanese Writers in the “Bandung Moment”, at the Global History Colloquium at the Free University of Berlin
September 2019
Spent a month in Tokyo doing research for Japanese Writers in the “Bandung Moment”, based at Waseda University thanks to the generosity of Toba Koji
July 2019
Figures of the World is officially in production, for publication in July 2020 from Northwestern University Press!
January 2019
Figures of the World, my book on the naturalist novel, is under contract with Northwestern University Press where it will appear in the FlashPoints series.
June 2018
Published my review of Gavin Walker’s The Sublime Perversion of Capital in American Historical Review
May 2018
Gave a talk on Endô and Fanon at the Centre de recherches sur le Japon of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, from my project Japanese writers in the Bandung Moment
December 2017
Elected Delegate Assembly representative for the modern Japanese literature forum of the MLA
Invited to join the Distinguished Speakers Bureau of the Association for Asian Studies’ Northeast Asia Council
October 2017
Published “Haven’t We Met? On the Scales of Comparison” in Verge as part of its “critical renga” on Asia and Latin America edited by Andrea Bachner and Christopher Bush. My contribution came from the first chapter of my book on the naturalist novel.
January 2017
Served as discussant for the MLA panel on music in Meiji Literature organized by Orna Shaughnessy
December 2016
Spoke on “Realist Moments and Modern Breakthroughs,” from the first chapter of my book on the naturalist novel, at the culminating conference of the Norwegian Research Council’s project The Scandinavian Moment in World Literature at the University of Tromsø
November 2016
Gave a talk drawn from my book on the naturalist novel, “The Chronogeography of the Novel: On the Transnationalization of Literary Forms,” at the symposium Sociology and History of World Society at the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft of the University of Bonn
May 2016
Led fourteen undergraduates in a University of Michigan Global Course Connections program in Tokyo and Hiroshima. The eighteen-day program was an extension of my Winter 2016 course on postwar Japan.
April 2016
Spoke on Japanese writers’ debates on war responsibility and the geopolitical position of Cold-War Japan for Postimperial Japan and East Asia, a workshop at Columbia organized by Kim Brandt and Louise Young. The talk built on my research on the Japanese delegation to the Tashkent Conference in 1958, for my project on Japanese writers in the Bandung Moment
March 2016
Gave a talk at the European University Institute on “Centers and Peripheries in Transnational Literary Fields,” for a workshop on The Geopolitics of European Intellectual Space organized by Stefan Nygård, Stephane Van Damme, and Blaise Wilfert. The talk drew on my research on the naturalist novel.
December 2015
Spoke at Japan and the Humanities Crisis, the workshop Steve Ridgely organized at the University of Wisconsin. My talk was titled “Humanities Classrooms and the Data-Seeking Student.”
March 2015
Gave a talk from my research on the Bandung Moment, “Tokyo in Tashkent: Japanese Writers and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference,” at the Association for Asian Studies meeting in Chicago. It was part of a panel I organized with Mike Bourdaghs, Dreams of Nonalignment: Legacies of Bandung in Japanese and Korean Literature, with papers by Youngju Ryu and Nick Lambrecht and Mike as discussant.
December 2014
Published “Crossed Geographies: Endō and Fanon in Lyon,” from my project on Japanese Writers in the Bandung Moment in Representations
November 2014
Presented my article “Crossed Geographies” and plans for my new project Japanese Writers in the Bandung Moment in Columbia’s University Seminar on Modern Japan. Emmanuelle Saada was the respondent.
October 2014
Gave the keynote address for the conference Intellectuals, Universalisms, and the Logics of Universalization, organized by Johan Strang and Stefan Nygård as part of the Academy of Finland’s project Asymmetries in European Intellectual Space. Henrik Stenius responded.
Made a guest appearance in the Free University’s Colloquium on Global History to talk about my chapter in Global Intellectual History
September 2014
Proposal for panel Dreams of Nonalignment: Legacies of Bandung in Japanese and Korean Literature accepted for the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting, along with my paper “Tokyo in Tashkent: Japanese Writers and the Afro-Asian Writers Association.” Youngju Ryu and Nick Lambrecht also will present, and Mike Bourdaghs will be the discussant.
May 2014
Accepted a job as Assistant Professor of Japanese literature at the University of Michigan. I will spend the fall at the Free University of Berlin on a postdoc and start at Michigan in January.
April 2014
Spoke on “Crossed Geographies: Endō and Fanon in Lyon” at the Bandung Humanisms conference organized at Columbia by Stathis Gourgouris and Aamir Mufti
Gave a talk about “Modes of Production, Modes of Exchange, and the Ages of World Pictures” at From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, a conference at Duke around Karatani Kōjin’s The Structure of World History
March 2014
Gave a paper on “‘Mimesis’ as Ansatzpunkt in the Transnational Naturalist Field,” from chapter one of my book on the naturalist novel in Auerbach’s Theory of Mimesis and Non-Western Literatures, the seminar that Chris Bush and I organized for the ACLA
Served as discussant for Brian Hurley’s panel Blood on the Scales: Japanese Literary History and the Sins of Translation at the AAS, with Brian, Dennis Washburn, Andrew Leong, and Alan Tansman (there in spirit)
February 2014
Gave a talk on “Translating the Realist Body: Naturalism’s Nervous Mimesis” at the Chico State Humanities Center, from chapter two of my book on the naturalist novel
Served as discussant for Jeremy Yellen’s talk “Japan’s Hybrid Empire: The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” at Columbia’s University Seminar on Modern Japan
December 2013
“Crossed Geographies: Endō and Fanon in Lyon” (point of departure for Japanese Writers in the Bandung Moment) accepted by Representations
November 2013
“Conceptual Universalization in the Transnational Nineteenth Century” published in Global Intellectual History (get a copy of Conceptual Universalization)
April 2013
Gave a paper on “Crossed Geographies: Endō and Fanon in Lyon” in Chris Bush’s seminar A Terrifying Proximity at the ACLA
February 2013
Spoke on “Endō Shūsaku and Frantz Fanon: Imperial Crossings” at the NYU Intellectual History Workshop, my first talk leading to Japanese Writers in the Bandung Moment
Served as discussant for Rich Calichman’s paper “Abe Kôbô: Thinker of the Social” at Columbia’s University Seminar on Modern Japan
January 2013
Spoke on “Geochronic Models of Periodization, or When Was Japanese Naturalism?,” from chapter one of my book on the naturalist novel at Carrie Eckhardt’s MLA panel What Does Comparative Literature Do For, Against, After Periodization?
December 2012
Published my translation of Takeuchi Yoshimi’s essay “Okakura Tenshin: Civilization Critique from the Standpoint of Asia” in Review of Japanese Culture and Society
July 2012
Translated Kawara On’s “The Rule of Conjunction” (“Setsuzokuhō,” 1962) at the artist’s request
April 2012
Gave a talk about “Tokyo via the World: Tangled Paths from Naturalism to Modernism” at the inaugural conference of the Society for Novel Studies
March 2012
Served as discussant for the panel ‘Travel’ of People and Texts in East Asia and Beyond, organized by Heekyoung Cho at the AAS
Spoke about “The Teleologies of Modernism” at Penn State’s Comparative Literature Luncheon (watch the video of “The Teleologies of Modernism”)
Gave two talks at the ACLA: “Inductive Histories” (from chapter one of my book on the naturalist novel) in Eric Hayot’s and Jing Tsu’s seminar The Theoretical Possibilities of Large-Scale Literary Studies, and “The Eighties Were Elsewhere,” for the ACL(x) panel on the Eighties
January 2012
Spoke on “The Teleologies of Modernism” for the Comparative Modernisms Workshop at Northwestern
My translation of Yamabe Rei’s essay “Kawara On’s Quantum Gravitational Body, or the Confinement of Space-Time and the Liberation of Consciousness” published in On Kawara: Date Painting(s) in New York and 136 Other Cities from David Zwirner Gallery
Published a review of Robert Tierney’s Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame in Journal of Japanese Studies
August 2011
Published a review of Unsettling History: Archiving and Narrating in Historiography, edited by Sebastian Jobs and Alf Lüdtke, in Social History
Received a Faculty Residential Research Award from the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley
June 2011
Gave two talks while I was Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, “Conceptual Universalization in the Transnational Nineteenth Century: An Approach to Global Intellectual History” and “The Role of the Past in ‘Modern’ Japan of the Meiji Era”
Published a review of Mark Anderson’s Japan and the Specter of Imperialism; in Journal of Japanese Studies
April 2011
Gave a paper on “Translating the Realist Body,” from chapter two of my book on the naturalist novel, at Kate Holland’s and Molly Brunson’s seminar Comparative/Interdisciplinary Realisms at the ACLA
March 2011
“Nana in the World: Novel, Gender, and Transnational Form,” from chapter four of my book on the naturalist novel, published in Modern Language Quarterly (get a copy of Nana in the World)
January 2011
Spoke on “Naturalism in the World History of the Novel” at Stanford’s Working Group on the Novel
Gave a talk on “Tengai, Zola, and the Unbound Woman: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form,” from chapter four of my book on the naturalist novel at the University of Washington’s East Asia Center
Gave a paper “Facing the World: Against the Comforts of Comparison” for the panel Comparative Modernisms organized by Haun Saussy at the MLA
May 2010
Spoke about “Tengai, Zola, and the Unbound Woman: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form,” from chapter four of my book on the naturalist novel at the University of Tokyo, with thanks to Numano Mitsuyoshi
April 2010
Gave a paper on “Conceptual Universality in the Transnational Nineteenth Century,” Sam Moyn’s and Andrew Sartori’s Workshop on Global Intellectual History at NYU, the first version of my chapter in Global Intellectual History
January 2010
Appeared on the MLA radio show “What’s the Word,” discussing Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Bonheur”
December 2009
“Exhausted by Their Battles with the World: Neurasthenia and Civilization Critique in Early Twentieth-Century Japan” published in Perversion and Modern Japan: Experiments in Psychoanalysis, edited by Nina Cornyetz and Keith Vincent (get a copy of Exhausted by Their Battles with the World)
November 2009
Talked about “Maedakō Hiroichirō: Bi-, Trans-, and Inter-national in Japanese History” at the Modern Japan History Workshop
October 2009
“The Travels of Naturalism and the Challenges of a World Literary History,” from chapter one of my book on the naturalist novel, published in Literature Compass (get a copy of “The Travels of Naturalism”)
Gave a talk on “Exhausted by their Battles with the World: Neurasthenia and the Late-Meiji Writer” at the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford
September 2009
National History and the World of Nations named runner-up for best book in non-European history by H-Soz-u-Kult
March 2009
“The Naturalist Novel and the Boundaries of Japanese Literature” published in Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies (get a copy of The Naturalist Novel and the Boundaries of Japanese Literature)
“What’s the Matter with Saying ‘The Orient’?,” one of the most useful things I’ve written, published by the Japan Society’s About Japan project (get a copy of What’s the Matter with Saying ‘The Orient’?)
January 2009
Spoke on “Nationalism as Comparative and International History” in a panel I organized for the AHA, The Problem of Nationalism in a Global Frame
December 2008
National History and the World of Nations published by Duke
Gave a paper on “Simultaneity, Unevenness, and the Failures of Modernity” for the panel Modernity: Why? organized by Regenia Gagnier at the MLA
November 2008
National History and the World of Nations (in galleys) awarded Yale’s Heyman Prize for outstanding junior-faculty scholarship
Spoke on “Enlightened Japan: Local Reading and European Universalism” in Sebastian Conrad’s and Martin Van Gelderen’s seminar The Enlightenment and its Legacies: Europe and Beyond at the European University Institute
April 2008
Gave a paper on “Nana in the World: The Naturalist Novel and Its Fellow Travelers,” from chapter four of my book on the naturalist novel, in the Traveling Discourses seminar at the ACLA<e
Christopher L. Hill 