Samuel Perry
Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies:
East Asian Studies
Phone: +1 401 863 9762
Samuel_Perry@brown.edu
Samuel Perry examines the revolutionary culture of early 20th century Japan and Korea. Focusing on the proletarian avant-garde, women's fiction, children's literature, his current manuscript, Literary Activism in Proletarian Japan, shows how proletarian artists and activists in the 20s and 30s reconfigured culture into a vital social practice, opening up new critical spaces in the intersections of class, gender, ethnicity and childhood.
Biography
My career in the academy has taken me from my days as an undergraduate here at Brown on to study abroad programs in Kyoto, Seoul, and Freiburg, Germany. After working in Ishikawa Japan for several years and then as a teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy, I went on to graduate school at the University of Chicago, several more years of study abroad in Seoul, Sapporo, and Tokyo, and most recently a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University.
Interests
Samuel Perry specializes in the revolutionary cultural movements of early 20th century Japan and colonial Korea. His first book is a translation of, and critical introduction to, Kang Kyŏng-ae's 1934 newspaper novel In'gan munje, a classic of literary realism in the cannons of both South Korea and the DPRK, which has just been issued by The Feminist Press with the title, From Wŏnso Pond. Professor Perry has also published on the fiction of Chang Hyŏk-shu, and his writing on revolutionary childhood has recently been translated and published into Japanese. His second book, entitled Literary Activism in Proletarian Japan, shows how proletarian artists and activists reconfigured culture into a vital social practice in the late 1920s and early 1930s, opening up new critical spaces in the intersections of class, gender, ethnicity and childhood.
His third book project examines the Korean War from the perspective of neighboring Japan and three major communities: resident-Koreans, Japanese colonial returnees, and the ideologically divided Communist Party. Through readings of the mass media, fiction, photography and film produced at the time, the book will assess how the impact of the Korean War was experienced affectively in Japan, as well as how newly embraced concepts of democracy and citizenship were challenged and transformed through the experience of the Korean War.
Degrees
M.A., Ph.D.
Affiliations
Association of Asian Studies
Society for the History of Children and Youth
American Literary Translation Association
Teaching
I have taught classes at Brown on East Asian popular culture, Korean women's literature, revolutionary culture and the practice of translating Japanese fiction and poetry. This year I will add two new courses to the department's offerings this year: a survey of Japanese literature called, "From Basho to Banana: Four Hundred Years of Japanese Literature," and a seminar examining the history and culture of sexual minorities in East Asia, this year titled, "Queer Japan: History, Culture and Sexuality." In the future I look forward to teaching classes on Japanese and Korean film as well.
Funded Research
2007-08 Postdoctoral Fellowship, Harvard University (jointly offered by The Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies & The Korea Institute)
2007 Korean Literature Translation Institute Translation Award
2006 Center for East Asian Studies Dissertation Write-up Grant, University of Chicago.
2003-05 Fulbright Dissertation Research Grant, University of Hokkaido, Sapporo, Japan.
2003-04 International Communications Foundation Graduate Translation Fellowship.
2002-03 Korea Foundation Research Fellowship, Seoul, South Korea.
2001-02 Korea Foundation Language Training Fellowship, Seoul, South Korea.
1997-2001 University Unendowed Fellowship, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.