Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer Japanese Studies
Postdoc in SNSF project “Time and Emotion in Medieval Japanese Literature”
Contact:
E-mail: sebastian.balmes@aoi.uzh.ch
Tel.: +41 44 634 31 16
"I am a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Japanese Studies at the University of Zurich, and also hold a postdoc position in the SNSF project “Time and Emotion in Medieval Japanese Literature.” I received my PhD from LMU Munich for a dissertation on narratological characteristics of Japanese texts from the tenth to fourteenth century that are related to linguistic issues. A revised version of the thesis, in which I adapt narratological theory to classical and medieval Japanese literature, has been published with De Gruyter in 2022. I am editor of Narratological Perspectives on Premodern Japanese Literature (2020) and co-editor of a special issue on Time in Premodern Japanese Literature (2021). I have also published on other aspects of Japanese religion and culture, such as on the Buddhist reception of fictional literature and Genji kuyō. Currently, I am working on the Shintōshū with a special focus on the legends of Kōzuke Province, translating several of them. Within the SNSF project, I will conduct narratological analyses of different versions of these origin tales (engi) with regard to time and emotion, and I am also excited to use new methods such as historical discourse analysis. Furthermore, I take an interest in issues of orality and performance."