Edith Sarra « Faculty
Director of Graduate Studies
Associate Professor, EALC
Adjunct Associate Professor, Gender Studies
Adjunct Associate Professor, Comparative Literature
esarra 
indiana.edu
Goodbody Hall 225
(812) 855-4031
Education
- PhD, Harvard University, 1988
Research Interests
- Classical Japanese fiction and memoir
- Gender in Premodern Japanese culture
- 20th Century Anglo-American literary encounters with East Asian culture
Courses Recently Taught
- EALC J491 Practicum in Literary Translation of Modern Japanese
- EALC J461 Classical Japanese Language (bungo)
- EALC E321 Introduction to Premodern Japanese Literature
- EALC E201 Unreal Dwellings: Houses, Huts, & Palaces in Japanese Culture
- EALC J521 The Tale of Genji
Awards and Distinctions
- Trustees Teaching Award 2009, 2007, 2001
- East Asian Languages & Cultures Research Grant 2006
- Social Science Research Council Japan Advanced Research Grant, 1998
Publication Highlights
- "Unruly Tales from a Dutiful Daughter." In The Father/Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father. Eds. Rebecca L. Copeland and Esperanza Ramirez Christensen. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001, pp. 89-114.
- "Women, Readerly Response, and the Problem of Imitation: Mumyozoshi and the Vexed Beginnings of the Monogatari Canon." In Canonicity and Canon Formation in Japanese Literary Studies: Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies. Volume 1. Ed. Stephen D. Miller. University of Colorado, Boulder (Summer 2000): 447-69.
- Fictions of Femininity: Literary Inventions of Gender in Japanese Court Women's Memoirs. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
I am currently at work on a book entitled Wishful Thinking: Gender, Genealogy, and Fantasy in the Later Fiction of the Japanese Court. In it I explore preoccupations with gender, notions of paternal/maternal lineages between literary texts, authors, and characters, and tensions between the realistic and the fantastic in fictional tales of the imperial court in late classical Japan (ca. 1075 - 1250). I am interested in understanding how the declining aristocracy used fictional tales as a medium for envisioning creative allegories and alternatives for its own political and cultural predicament(s). The literature courses I teach reflect these interests as well as a number of others, related and unrelated to premodern Japan: spirit possession and mediumship, the craft of poetic translation as it has been practiced by Anglo-American Modernist and contemporary American expatriate poets, modes of autobiography and memoir, and intersections between poetry, spirituality, travel, and exile.
