Graduate Students

The overarching objective of Linda Galvane's dissertation is to examine the formation of a Japanese literary canon related to the subject of sadomasochism and other closely related 'perverse' and 'obscene' aspects of sexuality. Focusing specifically on the “gray areas,” namely on the writers and works that have left a great impact on the many examples of canonical literature that deal with the issue of sadomasochism but have been excluded from the canon because of their status as pornography, she is interested in examining the strategies and politics that have informed the canonization of certain works, writers, and tendencies in Japan, while excluding others. What plays a role in defining the norm and the perverse, the perverse within the perverse, and distinguishing between literature and pornography? There are few of the issues that Galvane's research is attempting to address.

I critically analyze the concepts of jianghu and yi in martial arts fiction and explore their relationship to the state, legitimacy, and alternative communities.

My dissertation, Haptic Horizons: On the Cultural Politics of Hands in Modern China, aims to produce new understandings of intimacy, alienation, labor, and violence in the modern era through the interdisciplinary study of tactile culture. The project explores the many powers invested in human hands through narrative, asking how literature, film, and visual culture produce historically-shifting protocols of touch, as well as how stories assign socially-contingent meanings to the way people use their hands. In taking up these questions, my research not only contributes to the China field’s emerging interest in sensory experience, but also opens up a new vista for sustained future inquiry about how tactility interacts with sight, scent, and sound in a comprehensive aesthetic discourse of the body.

I'm currently working on my doctoral dissertation which traces and reconstructs the translational afterlife of Lu Xun and his thought in East Asia. I'm also interested in Chinese socialist literature, Japanese intellectual history, and the South Korean democracy movement, which will form part of my dissertation as well.

Medieval Japanese poetry and poetics

My research focuses on how gender informs music and literature in premodern Japan. Through studying the koto—Japanese transverse harp—and Japanese pre-modern music more generally, I examine the intersection of gender and music in the Heian period, and the transcultural interactions between Japan and East Asia during the pre-modern era. My methodology is necessarily transdisciplinary: combining literary analysis, musicology, and the study of material culture in order to understand the function of music in the premodern era. It is also feminist in nature; I study musical motifs and gender roles in Heian-era literary works, combined with feminist analysis to understand how women expressed their emotions and related to the world around them through music and writing. Through focusing on music and gender, I seek the voices the voices of those who have long been forgotten. I hope to amplify the connections between cultures and peoples, relationships that are not always heard.