Annual meeting

AJLS 32nd Annual Meeting

Translating, Transfiguring, Transforming Japan

May 2–3, 2025, Dartmouth College

Call for Papers and Panels

The 32nd Annual meeting of the Association of Japanese Literary Studies will be convened at Dartmouth College on May 2 and 3, 2025. We anticipate beginning around noon on 5/2 (Friday) and concluding in the evening of 5/3 (Saturday).

The theme of the conference is translation, broadly conceived. While this theme certainly encompasses interlingual and intralingual translation as conventionally understood, we also welcome papers addressing intersemiotic translation, including those from scholars outside of literary studies. We are particularly interested in papers that address issues of representing (or misrepresenting) conceptions of Japan past, present, or future with an eye to the factors that mediate such translations, transfigurations, and transformations.

In this vein, the paper/panel proposals may consider a range of thought-provoking questions including:

●        How do aesthetic, political, commercial, and professional concerns influence these representations of “Japan” within the translated texts, images, or multisensory media?

●        What are the ethical implications of specific strategic decisions and compromises made when “translating”?

●        Where do we see paradigmatic shifts in the dominant frameworks or discourses that predetermine the shape of the representations of “things of Japan”?

●        In what ways do the methodologies of our disciplines configure our representations of the object of study (i.e., a subcategory of “things of Japan”) ?

●        How do dominant theoretical concerns determine our choices for objects of study as well as prefigure the contours of our transformations of them?

We will especially encourage proposals from graduate students, early-career researchers, professional translators (from Japanese to a non-Japanese language or from classical Japanese/kanbun to a modern language).

Please email your 250-word proposal of a single paper or 500-word proposal of a panel (three presenters and a discussant) to sachi.schmidt-hori@dartmouth.edu by 11:59 pm (ET), Sunday, December 15, 2024 along with the following information:

·         Tentative titles of the papers/panel

·         Names, ranks, and institutions of the presenters and discussant

·         Language of presentation (English or Japanese)

We will notify applicants of the results in mid-January 2025.

We look forward to seeing many of you on our beautiful campus next May!

Sachi Schmidt-Hori

Dennis Washburn

James Dorsey