Yoshitaka Yamamoto
A.B., Harvard University, 2008
M.A., University of Tokyo, 2012
Ph.D., University of Tokyo, 2019
Yoshitaka Yamamoto is a scholar of premodern Japanese literature. He specializes in Edo and Meiji (seventeenth- to nineteenth-century) Japanese literature and cultural history, with a focus on Literary Sinitic (classical Chinese) poetry and prose by Japanese-speaking authors. He is interested in examining the wide-ranging trajectories and functions of Literary Sinitic texts in premodern and modern Japanese society, arts, and culture in a transnational and comparative context. He received his academic training in premodern Japanese and Chinese literature, as well as in twentieth-century Anglophone and Francophone literature and literary theory. Before coming to Yale, he was an associate professor at the National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL) in Tokyo.
Yamamoto is the author of Shibun to keisei: bakufu jushin no jūhasseiki [Sinitic Poetry, Prose, and Ordering the World: The Eighteenth Century through the Eyes of Shogunal Confucian Scholars], published in Japanese by the University of Nagoya Press in 2021. His English-language research has appeared in Late Hokusai: Society, Thought, Technique, Legacy (2023), Interdisciplinary Edo: Toward an Integrated Approach to Early Modern Japan (2024), The Bodleian Library Record (2024), and Arts of Asia (2025). His current book project explores the ways in which imitations of past Japanese and Chinese literary models provided seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Japanese authors of Sinitic texts with avenues for self-fashioning and empowerment.
Office Hours:
Tuesday 4:00pm-5:00pm or by appointment
Publications
Shibun to keisei [Sinitic Poetry, Prose, and Ordering the World]