About the speaker:
Michelle Li received her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from Princeton
University in May 2000 with a major in pre-modern Japanese literature
and minors in pre-modern Chinese and Japanese religions with an
emphasis on Buddhism, and pre-modern Japanese history. Her focus
in recent years has been on the grotesque and other modes of
representation centered on the physical body in ancient and medieval
Japanese literature. She is especially interested in the places in texts
where religion, history, and literature meet. Her dissertation, Unfinalized
Bodies: Reading the Grotesque in Setsuwa Literature, which she is
currently revising as a book, develops a theory of the grotesque in
short tales from the Konjaku monogatari shu and other collections of
short tales compiled between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. She is
also presently expanding her understanding of the grotesque by
exploring how an aesthetic similar to the grotesque in setsuwa functions
in Japanese literature from other genres and historic periods. Her next
major project after completing this work will be a cross-disciplinary study
of ancient and medieval wet nurses who, in addition to having great
psychological impact on individuals, were politically and economically
significant.
In addition to her years at Princeton, her academic background includes
a master's degree from Ochanomizu University in Tokyo in modern
Japanese literature, particularly from the Meiji and Taisho periods. She
has also lived and studied in Beijing. The first time, in 1989, was during
the student protests and military crackdown by the government in and
around Tiananmen Square. It was a significant period of her personal life
as well as she met future husband, Jiayi, then. Chinese language and
culture, including Chinese tale literature and its relationship to Japanese
tale literature, remain side passions of hers.