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About Jingyi Li
Hello! My research focuses on Japanese cultural and literary history. I am also interested in popular culture, intellectual history, and literature. My book project explores the identities of the literati groups in the nineteenth century.
Dr. Jingyi Li is an assistant professor of Japanese Studies at Occidental College, Los Angeles. She is a cultural historian of nineteenth-century Japan. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.
NBN Episodes hosted by Jingyi:
July 27, 2024
Alternate Currents
In the second half of the twentieth century, Reiki went from an obscure therapy practiced by a few thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans to a globa…
July 21, 2024
The Same Moon Shines on All
Yanagawa Seigan (1789–1858) and his wife Kōran (1804–79) were two of the great poets of nineteenth-century Japan. They practiced the art of traditiona…
July 19, 2024
Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan
Part of a formidable publishing industry, cheap yet eye-catching graphic narratives consistently charmed early modern Japanese readers for around two …
July 12, 2024
Beauty Matters
The notion of beauty is inherently elusive: aesthetic judgments are at once subjective and felt to be universally valid. In Beauty Matters: Modern Jap…
July 11, 2024
Waiting for the Cool Moon
In Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-Imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan's Empire (Duke UP, 2024) Wendy Matsumura interrogates the erasure of c…
April 28, 2024
Tree Spirits Grass Spirits
A collected series of intertwined poetic essays written by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito--part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential …
March 30, 2024
A Gentleman from Japan
On November 12, 1588, five young Asian men—led by a twenty-one-year-old called Christopher—traveled up the River Thames to meet Queen Elizabeth I. Chr…
March 17, 2024
Kings in All But Name
In the sixteenth century, members of the Ouchi family were kings in all but name in much of Japan. Immensely wealthy, they controlled sea lanes stretc…
January 4, 2024
Alice in Japanese Wonderlands
Since the first translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books appeared in Japan in 1899, Alice has found her way into nearly every facet of Japanese lif…
December 29, 2023
Meanings of Antiquity
Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, record…
December 22, 2023
The Russian Kurosawa
Olga V. Solovieva's book The Russian Kurosawa: Transnational Cinema, Or the Art of Speaking Differently (Oxford UP. 2023) offers a new historical pers…
November 19, 2023
Archaism and Actuality
In Archaism and Actuality: Japan and the Global Fascist Imaginary (Duke UP, 2023) eminent Marxist historian Harry Harootunian explores the formation o…
October 23, 2023
Writing Violence
Edo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial literature. A host of new narrative genres cast their gaze across the social landscape, probed the re…
August 12, 2023
Fukushima Futures
Both before and after the 2011 "Triple Disaster" of earthquake, tidal wave, and consequent meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, anth…
August 1, 2023
Language Ideologies and L2 Speaker Legitimacy
Jae DiBello Takeuchi's Language Ideologies and L2 Speaker Legitimacy: Native Speaker Bias in Japan (Mulitlingual Matters, 2023) examines dilemmas face…
April 10, 2023
Form and Feeling in Japanese Literati Culture
Matthew Mewhinney's Form and Feeling in Japanese Literati Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) explores how two early modern and two modern Japanese wri…
February 8, 2023
Racist Love
In Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (Duke UP, 2022), Leslie Bow traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of …
February 1, 2023
Sexual Abuse and Education in Japan
Bringing together two voices, practice and theory, in a collaboration that emerges from lived experience and structured reflection upon that experienc…
December 24, 2022
Haruki Murakami and the Search for Self-Therapy
Haruki Murakami, a global literary phenomenon, has said that he started writing fiction as a means of self-therapy. What he has not discussed as much …
December 23, 2022
Anime's Identity
A formal approach to anime rethinks globalization and transnationality under neoliberalism Anime has become synonymous with Japanese culture, but its …
November 29, 2022
Blind in Early Modern Japan
While the loss of sight—whether in early modern Japan or now—may be understood as a disability, blind people in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) could …
September 30, 2022
Okinawan Women's Stories of Migration
The phenomenon of “war brides” from Japan moving to the West has been quite widely discussed, but this book tells the stories of women whose lives fol…
September 7, 2022
Letters from Japan's Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Cultural historians Morgan Pitelka and Reiko Tanimura partner with one of Japan’s premier experts in calligraphy and letter writing, Takashi Masuda, t…