Education

Ph.D. in Japanese Literature, Harvard University, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, 1985

M.A. in Regional Studies-East Asia, Harvard University, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, 1979

B.A. in Japanese and Linguistics, Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1977

Research Interests

Classical and Early-modern Japanese Literature, Japanese Women’s Writing, Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb.

Biographical Notes

His interest in East Asia began while living in Taiwan as a boy and developed further after he spent a year in Kyushu, Japan, as a Rotary International high school exchange student. He has written and contributed to four different books, as well as many different articles relating to Japanese culture. His SAS Signature Course, Global East Asia, applies theories of globalization and localization to the region based on a lifetime of experience there. His current research project is taking him back to the classical period, however; it addresses male interiority and self-representation in a Heian courtier's diary written in Sino-Japanese.

Click here to view CV of Professor Schalow.

Awards, Fellowships, and Grants

  • Nominated for the 2007 Warren-Brooks Prize for Outstanding Literary Criticism, for A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2007).
  • Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ; School of Historical Studies, 2001-2002 || Project: "A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan"
  • Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, New Brunswick, NJ; Rutgers University Faculty Fellowship, 1999-2000 || Project: "Time and Memory of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Victimhood in a Global Culture."
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, 1995-96 || Project: "A Poetics of Love in Edo Literature"
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar "Themes in Japanese Philosophy", Ohio State University, 1994 || Project: "Love-Suicide and the Heresy of Romance in Edo Literature"
  • Awarded the 1990 Japan U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, for Ihara Saikaku’s The Great Mirror of Male Love (Stanford University Press, 1990).
  • The Japan Foundation Research Fellowship, 1989 || Project: "Kana-zōshi on the Theme of Male Love, ca. 1625-1675"
  • Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, University of Massachusetts-Amherst Junior Faculty Fellowship, 1987 (spring) || Project: "Cross-Cultural Methodologies in the Study of Sexuality: Nanshoku in Pre-modern Japan"
  • Fulbright Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, 1982-83 || Project: "Study and Translation of Ihara Saikaku's Nanshoku ōkagami (The Great Mirror of Male Love)"
  • Danforth Foundation Graduate Fellowship, 1977-81
  • Rotary International High School Exchange Fellowship, 1970-71

Selected Publications

Books:

Articles:

  • “Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Economies of Victimization, Communities of Empathy,” in Essays in Honor of Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, eds. Judit Árokay, Verena Blechinger-Talcott, and Hilaria Gössmann (Munich: Iudicium, 2008), 409-426.
  • “Figures of Worship: Responses to Onnagata on the Kabuki Stage in Seventeenth-Century Japanese Vernacular Prose,” in Transvestism and the Onnagata Traditions in Shakespeare and Kabuki, edsMinoru Fujita and Michael Shapiro (Kent: Global Oriental, 2006), 59-70.
  • “Five Portraits of Male Friendship in the Ise Monogatari,Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 60.2 (2000): 445-488.
  • “Theorizing Sex/Gender in Early Modern Japan: Kitamura Kigin’s Maidenflowers and Wild Azaleas,Japanese Studies 18.3 (1998): 247-263.
  • "The Invention of a Literary Tradition of Male Love: Kitamura Kigin’s Iwatsutsuji,Monumenta Nipponica 48.1 (1993): 1-31.
  • "Spiritual Dimensions of Male Beauty in Japanese Buddhism,” in Religion, Homosexuality, and Literature, eds. Michael L. Stemmeler & José Ignacio Cabezón (Las Colinas, Texas: Monument Press, 1992), 75-94. Reprinted in Queer Dharma: Voices of Gay Buddhists, ed. Winston Leyland (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1998), 107-124.
  • "Male Love in Early Modern Japan: A Literary Depiction of the ‘Youth’,” in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, & George Chauncey (New York: New American Library, 1989), 118-128.

Courses Offered

  • Global East Asia (01:098:245) cross-listed with (01:214:245)
  • Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (01:565:315)
  • The Samurai Tradition in Japanese Literature and Film (01:565:320)

Professional Affiliation at Rutgers