Professor of American Literature at the Graduate School of the University of Tsukuba.
Doctorate from the University of Tsukuba in 1988.
Exchange Professor from Seijo
University to the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee (UWM) in 1995 to co-teach
with Ihab Hassan. Fulbright Research Professor and International Fellow at the
Center for the 20th (now 21st) Century Studies at UWM in 1998. Chief Researcher
of the projects "Epistemological Framework and English/American Literature" funded
by the Japan Society for Promoting Sciences for the academic years 2002-05 and
"Geography and Literature in English" funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education
for the academic years 2005-2007.
Chair of the American Literature Society of
the University of Tsukuba (ALSUT, 2003-present).
Editor of the biennially published
magazine Review of American Literature (ALSUT, 1998-2006).
Co-editor of
two books: American Literature and Technology (ALSUT, 2002; in Japanese)
and In Context: Epistemological Frameworks and Literary Texts (Society
for the Study of Epistemological Framework and English/American Literature, 2003;
in Japanese) and Domain of Knowledge (Tokyo: Yushokan, 2007; in Japanese).
Elected Member of the International Association of University Professors of English
(IAUPE) from 2003.
Author of Daughters of Time: Art and Nature in Antebellum
American Prose (Tokyo: Nan'un-do, 2005; in Japanese).
Topics of recent papers
include: Moby-Dick and navigational instruments, Matthew Fontaine Maury and the
Physical Geography of the Sea, Ralph Waldo Emerson's early lectures and geology,
Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the verifiability
of the Antarctic Explorations, Richard Adams Locke's "The Moon Hoax" and the Telescope,
Mechanical and Verbal Orreries (mechanical device to show the movement of the
Solar System).
For a somewhat fictionalized version of personal portrait, see:
Ihab Hassan, Between the Eagle and the Sun: Traces of Japan (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1996), 119-20 (the 119 in Japan is the number for
ambulance).
