kaoruhayashi

Image
kaoruhayashi@arizona.edu
Office
Learning Services Building 110
Hayashi, Kaoru
Assistant Professor

Kaoru Hayashi is a scholar of premodern Japanese literature, specializing in classical tales. Her areas of research interest also include premodern Japanese history and religious studies, area studies, and modern film and mass media. Her book project, “Mediating Spirits: Narratives of Vengeful Spirits and Genealogies in Premodern Japanese Literature,” explores the invocation of the angry dead both as a social practice of genealogical imagination repeatedly thematized within premodern Japanese literary texts and as an act whose structure generated a narrative voice integral to the development of classical Japanese narratives. Hayashi received her M.A. and Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from Princeton University and B.A. in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Smith College. Before joining the University of Arizona, she was an Assistant Professor at Texas State University, and spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University.

Currently Teaching

EAS 201 – Myth, Memory, Mind: Introduction to Traditional East Asia

What would it be like to visit China, Japan, and the Korean Peninsula in premodern times? What is East Asian Studies? This course offers an introduction to the histories, cultures, languages and scripts, religions, and literatures of traditional East Asia. It also invites students to participate in the interdisciplinary knowledge production that is East Asian Studies. While we explore what has been historically shared among these East Asian societies, our emphasis is on how East Asia has always been diverse and heterogeneous. We encourage students to debunk the popular myths about East Asia--particularly premodern East Asia--as an exotic and homogeneous place. This will not only inform our understanding of today's East Asia in its historical context, it will also prompt us to actively address the historical legacy of orientalism.

JPN 446A – Power, Sexuality, and Aesthetics in Early Japanese Literature

Survey of pre-modern Japanese literature, with readings in English translation: Court literature, to 1330.

JPN 546A – Power, Sexuality, and Aesthetics in Early Japanese Literature

Survey of pre-modern Japanese literature, with readings in English translation: Court literature, to 1330. Graduate-level requirements include an extra seminar meeting a week, additional readings, and a research paper.