Research Bio

Jonathan Zwicker's research is focused on the literature, theater, and visual culture of Japan from the 1770s to the 1910s. In this field, he has written and published on a variety of topics including the morphology of the novel, the epistemology of representation, the histories of books and their readers, the emergence of new modes of historicism, and the meanings and uses of theater ephemera. He has published two books in this area: Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the Novel, and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Harvard Asia Center, 2006) and Kabuki’s Nineteenth Century: Stage and Print in Early Modern Edo (Oxford University Press, 2023), and my essays have appeared in a variety of journals and edited volumes including The Novel, The Blackwell History of the Novel, The Postcolonial World, The Voice as Something More, and the Japanese volumes Koten no saisei (The Revival of the Classics) and Edo no ōchō bunka fukkō (The Heian Cultural Revival in Edo). 

Currently, he is working on three projects each of which pick up a strand of his earlier research but moves in a different direction: an examination of literature and urban space in Japanese fiction between 1890 and 1915; a history of the role of Japanese-American intelligence officers in film censorship during the Occupation of Japan from 1945-49; and an examination of the role of television in the career of the filmmaker Ozu Yasujirō (1903-63). 

His teaching ranges across a variety of subjects including courses on both premodern and modern Japanese literature; modern East Asian literature in a comparative context; courses with readings in Japanese of fiction, poetry, and manga in Japanese; and a lecture course on the work of Miyazaki Hayao and Murakami Haruki. 

Research Expertise and Interest

literature and cultural history of early-modern and modern Japan