Speakers
Laura Moretti
Professor of Early Modern Japanese Literature and Culture
Head of Department of East Asian Studies
Co-Chair of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
The University of Cambridge
Laura Moretti is Professor of Early Modern Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at Emmanuel College. Her research focusses on early modern Japanese commercial prose. She has published extensively in English and Japanese, including: Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan: The World of Kusazōshi (edited with Satō Yukiko; Brill, 2024); Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan (Columbia University Press, 2020); Recasting the Past: An Early Modern Tales of Ise for Children (Brill, 2016); and “The Japanese Early-Modern Publishing Market Unveiled: A Survey of Edo-Period Booksellers’ Catalogues,” East Asian Publishing and Society 2 (2012): 199–308. Every year she runs the Mitsubishi Corporation Summer School in Early Modern Japanese Palaeography, which celebrated the twelfth anniversary in 2025.
Yukiko Sato
Professor
Department of Japanese Literature
Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology
The University of Tokyo
Yukiko Sato received her Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Tokyo in 2000. Her research focusses on Japanese novels and rakugo from the late early-modern period into the early Meiji period. Major publications include: Santō Kyōden: Kokkei share daiichi no sakusha (Mineruva Shobō, 2009); Yōjutsu tsukai no monogatari (Kokusho Kankōkai, 2009); Edo no shuppan tōsei: Dan’atsu ni honrō sareta gesakushatachi. (Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2017); Bakumatsu no gōkan: Edo bungaku no shūen to tensei (Iwanami Shoten, 2024).
Akira Takagishi
Professor
Department of Art History
Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology
The University of Tokyo
Akira Takagishi is a specialist in Japanese art history, especially on hanging scrolls and handscrolls from the Medieval period. Upon receiving his doctorate from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, he was a Research Fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and then a curator at The Museum Yamato Bunkakan. He was also Associate Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and is currently Professor in the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology at the University of Tokyo. In addition, in 2011 he was the Ishibashi Foundation Guest Professor at the University of Heidelberg, Germany His research focuses on Yamato-e paintings of the Medieval period in Japan. His publication, “A Study of the Ten Realms of Existence Screens in the Taimadera Okunoin Temple Collection,” received the prestigious Kokka Prize in 1998. In 2011 his article, “A Study of the Execution and Appreciation of Picture Handscrolls in the Muromachi Period,” was awarded the JSPS Prize. He is also interested in topics such as the political context of painting production amidst power struggles in Medieval Japan, and in the establishment of the institutional structures of the Tosa School.
Tomoyuki Deguchi
Associate Professor
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
The University of Tokyo
Professor Deguchi earned his B.A. from the University of Tokyo’s Department of Literature and later completed his doctoral studies in the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, obtaining a Ph.D. in Literature.
From 2010 to 2017, he worked for Tokai University as a lecturer and an associate professor. In 2018, he joined the University of Tokyo. Specializing in modern Japanese literature and art, he pursues research in the literature of the Meiji period, literary networks, and the interplay between literature and art.