Profile

Michiko Suzuki received her Ph.D. in Japanese with a minor in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 2002. She also holds a M. Phil. in English Renaissance Literature from Cambridge University and an M.A.in English Literature from the University of Tokyo. Her research focuses on the intersection of literature and culture, particularly women's writing and popular literature. In her current book project, “Becoming Female in Modernity: Discourses of Love in Japanese Women's Writing: 1910 – 1940,” she examines pre-war novels by Japanese women writers. Through her cultural-studies approach to literature, she analyzes how such narratives engage the literary, socio-historical, and cultural discourses of the times on such issues as same-sex love, marital love, and maternal love.

Her next book project will focus on the pre-war genre of family romance in Japan. Such romances were serialized in magazines and newspapers and read by women for fun while also often containing moral messages.They tended to reflected social changes such as the changing nature of family politics. In this time of social transitioning, the figure of the stepmother played a prominent role. Suzuki would like to focus on the interesting and little-studied figure of the stepmother and the social phenomenon surrounding the changing family dynamics as reflected in the family romance genre.

This fall she is teaching a graduate seminar on modern Japanese literature from the 1890s to the 1940s. In the spring she will teach the second half of third-year Japanese as well as an undergraduate survey of Japanese literature in which she will focus on issues of modernity in Japanese literature.

Suzuki looks forward to being a part of the dynamic IU East Asianist community.

TOP

Main Page Reports Faculty News Student & Alumni News EASC Events & News Profile Print Ready Newsletter