Sumie Jones
Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Professor Jones is a specialist of Japanese-Western literary relations, 18th-century comparative arts, and early modern Japanese literature (Edo period). Having graduated from Waseda University in Tokyo, she came to this country on a Fullbright fellowship and received an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle. She has been a research fellow at Harvard University, at the University of Tokyo, and at IU's Institute for Advanced Study.
At IU she has taught a wide variety of classes and seminars, including Major Characters/Themes in World Literature, Comparative Literary Analysis, Asian Film, and Japanese-Western Literary Relations. Her graduate seminars include: Sexuality and the Arts, Japanese-Western Studies, History of Japanese Theater, Japanese Art and Aesthetics, Courtly Culture, East and West, and Classical and Early Modern Japanese Literature.
Author of Retorikku to shite no Edo (The Rhetoric of Edo, 1992), she is co-editor of Visions of the Other, volume 2 of the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Congress of the ICLA, 1995 and editor of Imaging/Reading Eros (1996). Her articles have appeared in such journals as the Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, Hikaku Bungaku Kenkyu, and Edo Bungaku. From 1993-1997, she directed an NEH collaborative project on "Leisure and Popular Culture in Japan, 1750-1850."
