Academic interests
My areas of interest include modern Japanese literature, cultural and social developments in contemporary Japan, especially vis-a-vis woman’s position in it. My methodological approach has been mainly a text-based and context-oriented analysis of literature and culture. Although my doctoral thesis was on Natsume Sôseki, I have written on various other modern authors, as well as on the family politics and welfare system in Japan and Norway from a comparative, sociological perspective.
In connection with centenary of his death (2016), Natsume Sôseki has received renewed critical attention, to which I have also made a few contributions. My monograph, Rereading Sôseki: Three Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Novels (Harrassowits Verlag 1998), is now available for free download in CEAS Reprint Series for Rare and Out of Print Publications at Yale University. I have also co-edited Japanese and English anthologies of essays on Sôseki together with Alan Tansman and J. Keith Vincent (2019).
I have also been a member of the research initiative, Literature, Emotion and Cognition (LEC), at ILOS which inspired my most recent project, “Affect and Cognition in Modern Japanese Literature” (working title). It examines novels by among others Natsume Sôseki, Ôe Kenzaburô, Tsushima Yôko, Kirino Natsuo, and Kawakami Mieko with a focus on how affect and cognition play out in interpersonal relationships both within and outside fictional worlds. This resulted in my monograph, Affect, Emotion and Sensibility in Modern Japanese Literature: From Natsume Sôseki to Ishimure Michiko (Routledge, 2025).
My new research project, which is a collaborative project under Eco-emotions in LEC, concerns Okinawan literature and the long view of history, and is currently under planning.
I am also a member of the project team, “Environmental Humanities as Indigenous Semiotics: Tsushima Yûko's Jakka Dofuni (口承記号論としての環境人文学：津島裕子「ジャッカドフニ」の翻訳と注釈)," supported by the Yanai initiative’s JPP (Japan Past and Present) Project Funding program 2025.
Educational Background and Appointments
Professor Emerita, University of Oslo, Fall 2024
- Wigeland Visiting Professor, University of Chicago, Fall 2017
- Council member of the EAJS (European Association for Japanese Studies), 2011-2014.
- Officer/Secretary of the EAJS (European Association for Japanese Studies), 2008-2011.
- Council member of the EAJS (European Association for Japanese Studies) 2005-2008.
- Professor, University of Oslo from 2001
- Guest researcher, Tokyo Univesity, 1998-1999
- Defending Ph.D thesis, University of Oslo, 1995
- Associate Professor, University of Oslo from 1994
- Honorary Fellow, University of Wisconsin, 1992
- Research Fellow, University of Oslo 1992 - 1993
- MA in Japanese literature and language, University of Wisconsin, 1982
- BA in English and American literature, Sophia University, Tokyo, 1980
- BA in Humanistic Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1979